The Man Called Brown Condor (3 page)

Teddy controlled the wheel with his stick so that it made a perfect turn over to where Johnny was standing. “Hey, Johnny. What you got?”

“How do you like this kite I made?”

“You make the best kites ‘round here.”

Johnny took the kite and string from his mother and handed it to Teddy. “Here. You take it. And don't you let it get hung up on no trees.”

Teddy carefully took the kite with one hand, put the ball of string under his arm, and held the rusty bicycle wheel with the other. “Man, thank you, Johnny.” He smiled and started across the street, yelling to a friend half a block away, “Hey! Osborne Barabino! Look what Johnny give me. Look at this, man!”

Celeste said, “You didn't have to do that, son.”

It was dusk when Celeste and Johnny reached home. Charles Cobb was sitting on the porch.

“Where ya'll been? I was starting to worry, not to mention get hungry.” He laughed. “Bertha and me even got the stove hot.”

“I'm sorry, honey. I'll warm up some gumbo and some hot French bread.” Celeste took the bag of groceries from Johnny and walked to the kitchen.

From a small cloth bag, Charles Cobb shook a little tobacco onto a cigarette paper, curled the paper around the tobacco with his free hand, lifted it to his lips, licked one edge of the paper, and pressed the edges together to make a cigarette tapered at both ends. Holding the cigarette in one hand, he lifted the little tobacco bag to his lips with his other, grabbed the drawstring in his teeth, pulled it tight, and stuffed the bag into the top pocket of his bib overalls. Charles took a lucifer match from his pocket, lit it off with his thumbnail, and took a satisfying drag.

“Nothing better than your momma's gumbo. What you got to say for yourself, Johnny?”

“Nothing, Daddy, except I'm gonna look for work to help with my school money. I figure I can keep up with my chores ‘round here and still shine shoes at Union Station.”

Charles eyed Johnny. “You and Momma must a been talking mighty serious like.”

“Naw, Daddy. I just figured it's time I did something on my own. And I'd like to go with you to the shop, too, learn more 'bout machinery and things. Maybe I could help sweep up.”

Charles stood up and put his arm around the stepson he loved as his own. “That would be fine, son. Now let's go in and light a fire. I think it's gonna be right chilly tonight. Maybe after supper you can read me the paper 'bout the war and how our boys are doing over there. Might be a story 'bout those airplanes fighting in the sky. This world's in a real mess, but some mighty interesting things happening. You keep up with things, Johnny. This old world's changing, changing for colored folks too. Yes sir, you keep up with it boy. Now let's go see 'bout supper.”

Every morning Johnny walked the short distance to the three-room school he attended on Thirty-Second Avenue where grades seven through ten were taught. High school only went to the tenth grade. It was a wood frame building in need of paint. Inside it was clean, the bare wood floors smelled of linseed oil. In the center room there stood a large potbellied stove. On the coldest days, the center room was always too warm and the two rooms on either side too chilly. There were black boards, worn thin, on the walls of all three rooms. The schoolbooks were dog-eared hand-me-downs discarded by the white schools. A one-room building next door, called The Annex, served as the elementary school for grades one through six.

After school all the next week, Johnny looked for a spot with busy foot traffic where he could shine shoes. What he found was that all the best spots at Union Station were already spoken for by a healthy number of shoeshine boys, most of who were older than John. Then he discovered that his friend Collins was shining shoes at the OK Shoeshine Parlor on Fourteenth Street downtown. John applied to the owner, Mr. Sam Alexander. The small shop was a five-seat shine parlor and newsstand, and Mr. Alexander cleaned and blocked men's hats. John got the job and Collins showed him how a “professional” shined shoes. The shoeshine men weren't paid by the customers. The shine men would give the customer a token in a color assigned to them. The customer turned in the token and paid for the shine at the store register. The shine men were paid a percentage in salary for each of their tokens turned in. John figured the small salary plus tips was better than nothing.

Robinson was always interested in machinery and spent any time he wasn't shining shoes helping a mechanic who had a shop in his neighborhood. The man taught John to drive when he was fourteen. It was a task for which he quickly developed both skill and judgment.

In 1918 John turned fifteen. He was tall, carried himself well, and was a good student. One spring morning, he wore his Sunday suit to school.

In the school yard a young girl named Miomi Godine ran up to Johnny. “You're sure dressed up, Johnny Robinson, just like when you walk me to Sunday School. What you dressed up for?

They were joined by a boy Johnny's age wearing bib overalls, but no shirt or shoes. “Yeah, John, you gonna shine up to the teacher, or you been struck by love or something? You sure ain't gonna play no baseball after school in that getup.”

“Now don't you go messing with me, Ross. I'm dressed up 'cause I'm going to town after school to look for me a summer job, something better than shining shoes. School gonna be out soon.” Johnny turned to the girl. “Miomi Godine, you get yourself over to The Annex where you belong and don't make nothing out of me walking you to Sunday School. The only reason I do it is 'cause my momma and your momma are friends and ask me to look after you. Now you get! I don't want no smart mouth from you either, Ross.”

“Aw man, I don't mean nothing. How come you always gotta be so serious?”

“I just got things I gotta do, and getting me a summer job is one of 'em.”

Two weeks passed before John got what he considered a real job. He had impressed Mr. C. A. Simpson who owned a ship chandler business. When school let out for the summer, Johnny was first assigned to the warehouse where he did anything from sweeping to unloading and loading trucks. Mr. Simpson learned John could drive. He had just lost a driver to the army.

“You think you can handle that?” Simpson pointed to his 1917 REO stake bed truck.

“Yes sir, I can.”

Simpson told John to get up in the truck, got up beside him, and ordered, “Let me see you drive around town and then down to the port and bring me back here.”

John did and got the job driving the truck all that summer and every summer until he finished college. He was responsible for loading the truck with ship orders for parts, marine hardware, and groceries, delivering them dockside, and taking new orders while he was at the port. It was a job that required driving skill, accountability, and dependability. John excelled at it.

Halfway around the world, another young black man was busy at his first job. The young man was twenty-six-year-old Ras Tafari Makonnen, second cousin to Zaudith, the daughter of the late Menelik II and empress of Ethiopia. Ras Tafari had been appointed by the ailing Zaudith to be the ruling regent of Ethiopia, still known in much of the world as Abyssinia and before 1000 BC as Aksum. Fate would one day place the two black men together, the first to serve the second, the second to place his life in the hands of the first.

B
Y THE SUMMER OF 1920, THE
G
REAT
W
AR WAS A BAD MEMORY
. Johnny had come marching home victorious. America was settling in to a joyous peace, gleefully entering the prosperous, anything goes Roaring Twenties—the age of short-skirted flappers, jazz, prohibition, bootleg whiskey, speakeasies, automobiles, and barnstorming pilots.

At seventeen, John Charles Robinson carried himself confidently with a warmth about him that made him immediately likeable. In 1974, looking back some fifty years, different contemporaries, including Miomi Godine, Osborne Barabino, and Teddy Collins, described him in these terms:

“Kind, good at sports. He played on our baseball team.”

“Johnny was the best at everything he did.”

“I wanted to be just like hm.”

“He was dependable, always there to help others, an all-around guy.”

“Johnny was serious sometimes, but when he laughed, there was honest joy in it shared by all around him.”

“He never started trouble, got along with everybody. He was a leader.”

Most Sundays, Johnny attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small building at the corner of Thirty-Second Avenue and Twenty-First Street. The minister of the AME church, Pastor Lanoa, was also John's school principal. He recognized Johnny as an exceptional student and encouraged him to follow his parents' desire for him to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

On a Sunday afternoon in late August of 1921, Johnny walked aimlessly down Thirty-First Avenue all the way to the beach road. The Gulf waters sparkled under a blue sky laced with fair weather clouds. The breeze filled his lungs with the clean, salty scent of the sea
.
Thoughts about leaving home for the first time weighed heavy.
I'm gonna miss that water and the fishin' and swimmin' out there. Ain't nothin' like it up in north Alabama.

Johnny turned east toward town, paying attention to the surroundings as if seeing them for the first time . . . or the last.
Leavin' a place you know and love is harder than I reckoned now that it's almost time to go.
He passed the electric power plant at the foot of Thirtieth Avenue. Heavy black smoke billowed from the towering chimney. Behind the plant was the car barn where the town's streetcars were maintained. To the south he could see the harbor filled with steamships and tall-masted sailing ships, most taking on loads of lumber, some loading cotton bales. Since the Great War, steamships were beginning to outnumber the graceful, tall-masted barks, brigantines, and schooners that called at the port. Streetcars were running back and forth out to the grand pavilion at the end of the East Pier. Sunday strollers dressed in their best moved along the boardwalk parallel to the streetcar and railroad tracks. Men wore hats and ladies carried parasols for protection from the sun. John passed the ice plant where blocks of ice were being loaded into insulated boxcars that would transport vegetables and oranges, gathered from the outlying farms, all the way to Chicago. Johnny picked up a chip of ice and chewed it as he walked east across the front lawn of the Great Southern Hotel that faced the Gulf.

At Twenty-Fifth Avenue, he turned north to the center of town. On Sunday afternoons he had always liked to go downtown to watch the increasing number of automobiles. They were beginning to replace horse-drawn buggies and wagons just as steamships were replacing those powered by sail. Miller Tire and Gasoline Store stood not far from Alexander Livery, Harness and Vehicle Company. There were even two motorcycles in town.

Johnny turned off Twenty-Fifth Avenue at the Parlor Drugstore and walked west on Fourteenth Street past a restaurant. Black people were not allowed in the dining room, but they could buy a meal if they went down the alley to the back door. He walked on past the Hewes Brothers Building, turned on Twenty-Seventh Avenue at the Inn Hotel and crossed over to Union Station where signs lettered “White Only” and “Colored Only” marked separate waiting rooms. The station was always a center of activity—locomotives moving through, wagons and trucks loading or unloading, people coming and going, some being picked up or let out by the station taxi that ran between the station and the Great Southern Hotel as well as to businesses downtown. Between the G&SI and the L&N railroads, some twenty-two trains a day now stopped at Gulfport, passenger trains at the station and freight trains that rumbled onto sidings alongside loading docks. The air was heavy with the mingled odors of steam, burning coal, and heavily oiled machinery.

Soon it's gonna be my turn to get on one of those trains and leave this town. It's a good town with mostly good folks. Ain't been no trouble like I hear there's been in the Delta.

Johnny knew that he would have to leave the comfort of the familiar behind, and the thought troubled him. He had never been further out of Gulfport than Biloxi to the east and Pass Christian to the west. He was tall, black, leaving home, and a little afraid.

The September day he left for Tuskegee, Celeste Cobb packed Johnny's freshly washed and pressed clothes into a small worn trunk, the same one she had used when she traveled from Carrabelle, Florida, to Gulfport so many years ago. Just before closing the trunk, she tucked in a small Bible and a little extra house money she had been saving. Then she went to the kitchen and put sandwiches, cookies, a polished red apple, and a Mason jar, filled with iced sweet tea and wrapped in newspaper for insulation, into a brown paper bag.

“Charles,” she called. “We better go. He can't miss his train.”

Celeste and Charles Cobb, Pastor Lanoa, and many of Johnny's friends walked to Union Station with him. For all of them, this was a big occasion. He was one of only two young black men in town leaving for college.

Celeste hugged him. “I'm gonna miss you, baby. You be good and write to us, you hear?”

His father shook his hand. “Do the best you can, son. I know we'll be proud of you.”

John, dressed in a new suit, shirt, and tie, pushed his trunk up onto the landing and climbed the iron steps of the coach, the one marked reserved for colored only. He waved from an open window as the train pulled out of the station.

“You can cry now, Momma,” Charles Cobb said as he wiped the corners of his eyes. He offered his arm to Celeste. The two of them turned to walk home.

“Our boy is leaving, but I'm so proud we're sending him to college. You a good man, Charles Cobb.”

They crossed the tracks silently, arm and arm, Charles limping on his bad leg, Celeste in her best go-to-meeting dress.