Just Kids From the Bronx (16 page)

Writer/children’s book author specializing in African American themes

(1942– )

All of the action in our world took place on the stoop. It was our town square. We played dolls and jacks there and jumped double Dutch in front of the stoop. The stoop was also the place for news and gossip, which was mostly done by the adults and older girls. Those of us who were younger had no news or gossip. Only lies or stories we told, just to have something to say too. There was one neighbor who, when I think about it now, must’ve known everything about us. I can see her sitting in her third-floor window, with her arms folded, leaning on the pillow she kept on the windowsill. She sat at that window morning, noon, and night, in all seasons. She was the neighborhood watch before that term was ever used.

I don’t know anything about the West Bronx, Jerome Avenue, over there. We rarely traveled to that section of the Bronx. That was like another country. We lived farther east and north in the Morrisania area. I think in the early fifties, when I realized what was going on in the world, when I was about ten, that’s when drugs started coming in. We never felt threatened, though. It’s very interesting. Back in those days, you didn’t hear about women being attacked on the street or old people being held up. You didn’t have that. We lived in a tenement, 919 Eagle Avenue. There were also some private houses down the street, little private houses. One family—I remember them so clearly because they were doing so well—they had a house and they had a store.

Our neighborhood was primarily African American. There were a few, but very few, whites. Most of the whites had moved but there were two little girlfriends that I had, Patsy and Barbara. I guess they were the last two white children left in the neighborhood, and they just blended. They played with us all the time.

But though you had African American families of different economic levels, we were all in the same place. There was a musician who I’d see with his horn in a bag, going to work. There were a couple of nurses. There were some older kids who were going on to college. Then we had some very poor families. In our building there was a great mix. I guess to outsiders, all of us were poor, but although my family didn’t have a lot of material things, my mother and my father created a safe environment for us right in that apartment.

My mother read to me before my two younger brothers were born, which was before I could read on my own. Reading on my own was a big wish of mine. I’d beg her for
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
which she read to me over and over. She’d do that no matter how many times I asked, but in later years she confessed that she didn’t like that story at all and couldn’t understand my fascination with it.

My father had his own business. A photo studio in Harlem. When we were young, we had no idea of the years he’d spent, even before we were born, documenting cultural and historical events there. He had taken pictures of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and many other big bands, along with other famous people such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mayor La Guardia, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and so many others. He also took pictures of confirmations, baptisms, weddings, and many street scenes with ordinary folks, and always took pictures of us so that he didn’t waste any unused film. He documented our lives too.

My mother worked off and on, but she mostly worked in factories. And like I said, she tried to create a good environment for us. So we didn’t know how poor we were, materially.

As far as I knew, all the men in our neighborhood had jobs then, and there was a man, a father, in every household. You hear so much about these African American families, especially now, with the stigma that there’s no man in the household. There are only single women. It wasn’t like that when we were growing up. The men could get jobs and the families were together. They may not have been the best jobs or the highest-paying jobs, but they all worked. And if you were on home relief, as they called it then, that was a shame. You didn’t even talk about it.

Our next-door neighbor, who was also the super of the building, was the first person in our tenement to own a television. My brother Victor and I, along with the super’s grandsons, spent as much time as we could watching, but we were only allowed to stay for one program, the
Howdy Doody
show. My mother kept a check on us and warned us about wearing out our welcome. It was a happy day for us kids when my father finally bought a TV set. I watched the
Mickey Mouse Club
, my favorite
,
every day. Though back in those days there were no black kids in the club I related to Annette Funicello, who stood out from the others.

Like everything else, the TV set wore out, but you didn’t get a new television just because the old one was broken. Things got fixed or patched up or you improvised. My brothers and I improvised. We took turns standing behind the TV, holding the antenna to keep the picture going. We’d tell the person holding the antenna what was happening, but when it was time to switch, whoever’s turn it was, that person invariably whined about the length of time spent behind the TV instead of in front of it.

Our parents weren’t involved in this craziness. Neither had time to watch television. This is just what we had to do if we wanted to watch. One of my grandmothers lived with us. We came home for lunch when we were in elementary school, and if my mother wasn’t home my grandmother would be there, looking at the television. She loved Liberace. Oh how she loved Liberace! But she would be there for us.

I had a happy childhood, yet when the drugs started seeping in, I remember someone was hurt in the hallway. She was a junkie and she was shot. That’s when my father made the decision. “Okay. It’s time. We gotta get out of here.” I was fourteen. That’s when we moved to a house he bought on Belmont Avenue.

We left the old neighborhood, and then the world changed for me. When I entered Theodore Roosevelt High School, it was at the beginning of an influx of African American and Latino children from various parts of the Bronx. The lunchroom was segregated with all of the black students sitting together at two or three tables. Some of the teachers didn’t seem to like us much either. I can remember a few teachers who were superb and who didn’t seem to care who we were, as long as we learned. Not all of them were like the teacher who counseled college-bound kids. When I went to his office, I was told that college was for smart kids. I can’t even remember how I responded. I think that I probably believed him for a moment, but I still had my books, and by that time a dream. I wanted to be a writer. High school, where I discovered Langston Hughes and even wrote horrible poems imitating him, was the beginning of my journey. I ignored the school counselor and took college courses at night while working as a secretary during the day.

My mother’s love of books and writing and my father’s love of history and telling stories through his photographs influenced me, but dreams have to be supported. I continued taking night courses and worked during the day until I received a bachelor’s degree in English literature. What does a person who wants to be a writer do with a degree in English literature? You become an English teacher. But as the saying goes, “Man proposes and God disposes.” I discovered that teaching reading and language arts to middle-school and special education high school youngsters was what, in the end, I was supposed to be doing. I wrote and published seven books while I was still teaching, but I thought of myself as a teacher first and foremost. My last teaching assignment before retirement was in a middle school in Morrisania in the same neighborhood I grew up in. I had come full circle.

ROBERT KLEIN

Actor, comedian, author

(1942– )

My parents were ultracautious. “Yoyishtanem.” It’s a Hungarian expression, and it’s usually not good.
What are you doing? Watch out for that lamp cord! Wear white when you go out at night so the cars can see you! Don’t cut that bagel! You’ll slice your neck!
I’ve not read of too many beheadings while cutting a bagel.

When someone rang our doorbell at 6F—
Who
is
it?
Even the sound of it.
Who
is
it?
“Da
da
da.” It was automatic that no one came into the apartment. And if you didn’t recognize the voice, you looked through the peephole in the door. I remember even later, while on my own, when I already had a track record in show business, I’d get a phone call from my parents in Florida.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m staying home.”

“Good!”
How about some bubble wrap around me?

I never leave my thirty-year-old son, and I see him twice a week, without saying, “Drive carefully! Watch out. There’s rain.” My son boulders and does some rock climbing. The bouldering is not a Klein tradition in any way, shape, or form. He only goes maybe seven or eight feet up on a rock with special shoes. You don’t have far to fall. But it’s not as safe as Ping-Pong, for which I insist he wear a helmet.

Early on, the ability to make others laugh enhanced my image. I showed off in the first grade by making Joy Wyman, my classmate, laugh at my silliness. Things like imitating the teacher when she left the room. I always made the class laugh. I was always the class clown.

We are three generations, my father, myself, and my son, three consecutive generations whose parents had to go to the principal because the boy was fooling around. My father told me, “Don’t be a clown. It doesn’t pay!”

Our block, on Decatur Avenue, had three vacant lots that were used for playing. Our enemies were broken glass and dog shit. There were no
curb your dog
rules. People never even thought of doing it. These were active lots anyway. We played softball on this one lot facing up—home plate was downhill. And in the warmer weather, these women would sit outside in their folding chairs where it was cooler and they’d sit behind home plate.
What are you doing with this ball?
They had absolutely no concern for the fact that this was where we played.

We played softball on the lots, but we played stickball in the street. There were two kinds. The one where we played across the street on the Woodlawn Cemetery wall, where we aimed for the box on the wall with a broomstick with no real fielding. If you hit my building, it was a home run. If you hit above the fourth floor it was a triple. The other kind of stickball was fungo. You yourself throw the ball up. No one’s pitching to you. We played association football only in the colder weather, and if there was traffic you’d yell, “Car! Car!” and you never said that without its being true.

There was a sensible aspect to life there. It was a walking life. It was a public transportation life. There was a sensibleness to walking to grade school, walking to junior high school. Walking to high school. There were routines. Sunday mornings were special. My father would go to the bakery, and we would get six small rolls, which are known as kaiser rolls, but these were a more sensible size, and I would have a roll with cream cheese on one side and butter on the other. There was Freddie the barber who cut my hair from the time I cried when I was too small and had to sit on a little seat until I went away to college. In his shop there was this beautiful calendar of Babe Ruth in heaven. There was also a picture of a very handsome Jesus looking over the barbershop on the calendar at the other end.

Despite those good memories, I really didn’t like where I lived. I wanted something else. I wanted a backyard when I lived on Decatur Avenue. There were veterans coming back from the war and getting good loans. Moving to Westchester. Moving to Levittown. Going to the suburbs. My father used to take the subway downtown to work, but he took the New York Central back. The trains said, “Northward, to Chatham” and “Southward, Grand Central Station.” I wanted to go northward to Chatham. There was a kind of claustrophobic feeling I had where we lived. I wanted what I saw on television.

When we were very young, someone in the building on the second floor had a TV set before we did, and we’d come home from school, go to our neighbor’s, and watch
Six Gun Playhouse
. Or Republic and RKO Westerns with a young John Wayne, which often featured children galloping on a pony, usually white, across expansive plains. It appealed to me so much that eventually I learned to ride quite well in camp. That was one of the ecstasies in my life, galloping. Now, of course, I’d be afraid to gallop. So anyway, west and north were my favorite directions. The West Side. I didn’t like the East Side. And going west. I didn’t get to California until I was twenty-five, but then the smell in October of jasmine, when it was getting nasty back east, and every traffic light there turning green. I wanted more space.

I went to camp as a kid, and even though those were my father’s worst years because he was a terrible businessman, he still provided. Even in the worst year he’d take a place in Monticello or in Peekskill, which isn’t even twenty minutes away from where I live now. I loved the trees and the smell of the grass and I loved camp. All those experiences made me think that I wanted less concrete.