Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
“Sometimes people didn’t have it,” my mother continued. “It was just small change, but they didn’t have it. But during those times, with money being so short, you
needed your insurance more than ever. Because you couldn’t just skip a week and not be protected for that week. You would lose all of your money, your policy, and your investment to that
point.”
“He was a tall, big-boned man with brown skin that had red undertones like an Indian, and a wide, open face with a large nose. Solid. Honest. Thoughtful.”
By the time I was eight or so, I could cross large streets and run errands. I went over to Aunt Sissy’s every day. There were few disruptions to the quiet, organized life my grandmother
and I lived, and one of the only people or things that could really get under Lily’s skin was Sissy. She was too playful and unlike a sixty-year-old for my grandmother, who wanted Sissy to
act her age. But hell, sometimes Lily Scott wanted me to act
her
age. Somehow Sissy’s irreverence and disregard for quiet sanity irritated Lily; Sissy probably thought her
sister-in-law took herself too seriously.
I would return with a daily medical report, typically encompassing some new sickness I had never heard of. Of course, Aunt Sissy was entirely too knowledgeable to be any kind of serious about
made-up African illnesses; she was a retired nurse. And anyway, Sissy was always up and tottering around in her room, an especially tall, bony, chocolate lady with a round face, a pleasant smile,
and a head of gray hair cut close. Whether or not she needed me to run any errands, she would fumble around in her little purse for a couple of pennies for me for candy.
She shared her house with a short, silent woman named Miss Ora Boyd, and occasionally they would both sit on their porch in the early evening, though they didn’t seem to communicate with
each other much. If I went by after dinner, Sissy was immediately animated, always ready for a conversation.
“How come Aunt Sissy doesn’t have children?” I asked my grandmother once.
“Sissy was married,” my grandmother said, “and she had a son named Jimmy Doe who died.”
“From what?”
“He had a very badly curved spine. It made him look like a hunchback, and it got worse as he got older until his spine pressed in on his heart and killed him.”
I tried to organize a picture of that in my mind and failed.
“What is it? How do you get it?”
“It’s called scoliosis. It’s a curvature of the spine, a lateral curve. Sissy had a less disfiguring case of it.”
“Aunt Sissy got the epizootic,” I reported confidently. “From Africa. She said we come from Africa, me and her. Do we?”
“She came from Memphis and you came from Chicago,” said my grandmother. She sounded exasperated, the way she often did when Aunt Sissy was the subject.
I thought it over quietly.
“The epizootic won’t kill you, right?”
“Scotty, nothing will kill you if there’s no such thing. I’ve heard all that foolishness from Sissy about what she’s got and you know what it is? Nothing. That’s
what. Nothing.”
You don’t only get what you want from your ancestors. Or, you get everything from your ancestors. I didn’t know as a child that I had scoliosis, and that it was something that would
be a problem for me all my life, tilting me to the left like a six foot curiosity of Italian architecture. I found out years later, when I was given a physical in high school.
But Aunt Sissy running her bony fingers up and down my spine was not searching for our African ancestors. She was looking for Jimmy Doe, and happy he wasn’t there.
I am very proud of the education I collected through seventeen years and ten institutions, from south town in Jackson, Tennessee, to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland. The easiest way to describe the total experience would be “different.” Had it been a career I was describing, the word “checkered” might have come to mind, even
though that word reminds me of an old taxicab company rather than what I’m trying to say: black/white/black/white, an extensive journey that covered all of the educational possibilities,
including being taught at home. Because that’s where my education began, in the center room of the house on Cumberland Street at Lily Scott’s side. That is where I learned to read and
count and where I acquired my respect for education. From a woman with only a little.
Maybe the whole black/white/black/white thing would be no more descriptive than saying, “like a nun rolling down a hill.” But it worked out; from a Black and then a white school in
Tennessee to the same things in New York high schools and through college, the alternating stops held true. And it all began with a black/white school, Black children taught by white folks in
Jackson.
My grandmother took me over to St. Joseph’s the day I turned five. Me and my grandmother, our short legs pumping purposefully, wearing some semi-Sunday clothes, down two blocks on Tanyard
Street and past the projects to the three-story haunted brick residence of funny-looking clothes horses, employees and confidants of white folks’ God—represented, it seemed to me, by a
penguin (it was my first look at a nun). The white folks refused to let me in. I was finally admitted when I was confessing my true age of five and a half.
The school was in a dilapidated tenement-feeling building—purgatory for the few nuns and the red-faced priest sentenced to work there. It was a creepy damn place, and it provided an eerie
and frightful voyage through shadow-cloaked hallways filled with an eternity of God-fearing intimidation for young Black kids like me imprisoned there. The proof of the school’s physical
condition gained validity after my second year, when it was closed and the building condemned.
Whether God himself actually lived there somewhere, I could not decide initially. I did, however, determine that in spite of the youthful appearance of these nun-women in dust-dragging black,
they had been around St. Joseph’s for years and remembered my grandmother and her children, and it turned out they had refused me until I was five and a half on purpose. They didn’t let
me in because my grandmother wasn’t afraid of white folks. So I was punished, and made to feel uncomfortable.
There were lots of myths that other Black kids built up about Catholic school—like how they would wash your mouth out with soap. But I never saw any of that. In fact, I don’t
remember getting a whipping until I got to public school two years later. The classrooms were upstairs, above the church part, which was on the ground floor. They held mass every morning before
classes. If you were late for mass, you were considered late for school.
We studied the catechism. It was all taught by rote, so I could probably still recite the prayers. You remember them just like the Pledge of Allegiance; even if you didn’t know what you
were saying, it was understood that God was listening. I decided I couldn’t be a Catholic. At least not right then. There were too many fucking rules and regulations about where to stand,
where to sit, and when. At morning mass it was standing, sitting, kneeling, wheeling, dealing, silent, on prompts from occasional mumbling from the altar. Phooey!
The weird thing was what it did to the kids. How uptight and un-all right it made us. And that, too, became a life lesson about allegiance that I came to recognize as such. I had my introduction
to the tattle at St. Joseph’s. The rollover. And we were learning to do those things to ourselves for others who were not.
One early spring morning, I found an old rusty knife on my way to school. Later on someone told me it was a Swiss army knife, but that morning it was just a short, fat object of total
fascination. As I crossed a corner of the grass part of the walk in front of Liberty Street Church, my foot touched it. Dislodged it. And when I bent over to see what it was, I could not believe my
good luck.
It had been white at some point, a pearl or oyster color, and, man, was it cool. It had three or four different-sized blades, a corkscrew (for a very short cork), a bottle opener, a whittling
blade, and parts so glazed over with rust that I couldn’t pull them out. I was thinking about how I would remove the rust when I got home.
I got lost examining the wonders of my discovery, continuing on a path that my feet knew by heart. At the end of Tanyard Street, take a right to walk past the projects. Until about a block from
St. Joseph’s, I was still so intrigued by my find that I hardly noticed . . . Ann Morris. She was a classmate, but not someone I knew that well. She was already growing in her two permanent
front teeth and reminded me of Bugs Bunny.
But today, this morning, anyone was a good friend because I needed to show someone my knife. So I showed Ann Morris as we walked through the gate and up the front steps of the school. And I
dropped my prize into my coat pocket.
By lunch time it was forgotten. And after lunch, during recess, when a whole posse of first through fourth graders ran after each other and from one another in dizzying purposeless circles, I
felt and became aware of, without any actual signal, a change in the tenor of the game playing and each-other chasing. When I turned to check out what was going on, I saw a gathering, a ragged
huddle of small black and brown faces turned upward to the chalk white face that seemed stuck halfway through the “habitual” cowl, scowling down earnestly. In the midst of this forming
circle was Ann Morris and the subject of her earnest speech.
They were coming my way. All of them, with Ann Morris appearing even smaller and shrinking next to sister whatever-her-name-was holding her hand.
I don’t really remember how the interrogation began, but it had been about Ann Morris telling the woman that I had a knife, making it sound like a machete and me a midget Zorro. I said I
didn’t have one, that I’d thrown it away. And then Charles Dawson, on orders from the penguin, was designated to rummage through my pockets until, beneath a tissue and two gum wrappers,
in the coat lining . . .
I felt a wave of religious irony then: when you needed help you called for God. When you got it, you thanked Jesus. When you didn’t get it, you cursed God. But I didn’t. I cursed Ann
Morris. And Charles Dawson. And sister whatever-her-name-was, who used this drama of the search and discovery incident after my denial as a God-sent lesson that, (1) Thou shall not lie because, (2)
God will be sure thou art caught, and, (3) you will be punished. Sister whatever-her-name-was took charge of (3), and to illustrate it, I was sentenced to stand up against the fence every day
during recess. And I hadn’t reached seven years old at the time. But every day during recess, I felt like I was a thousand years old.
I did get several positive things out of St. Joseph’s. For one thing, I got an education that was good enough for me to be skipped a grade when I got to public school; I did the third and
fourth grades in one year. And for another, I got to make my debut as a vocalist in the second grade at St. Joseph’s during one of the many talent shows. I did an unaccompanied version of
“Jamaica Farewell,” by Harry Belafonte. It was number one at the time.
“Down the way where the nights are gay . . .”
Hell, it was a hit.
When St. Francis was condemned, I landed at South Jackson elementary school. I didn’t do a lot of singing there, but every once in a while my best friend Glover and me
would call ourselves doing something that was supposed to be singing. The prettiest girl in our class was named Wanda Womack. She had two sisters and they were all fine, but Wanda was the one in my
class. Somehow in fifth grade the word around school was that Wanda and I were “going together,” like girlfriend and boyfriend. It seemed as if people looked around and put people
together, just like that.
Ritchie Valens had just put out the song “Donna,” and Glover and I were fooling around and I was switching the words so that it was “Oh, Wanda” instead of “Oh,
Donna.” Glover dared me to sing it in class. I said I would if he’d do the background. The crowd went wild! Naturally, we tried another tune right after that. We went into “All in
the Game,” and it was awful.
Wanda and I ended up going together for a few years, until seventh grade. Though back then you’d have to stay up all night to be up early enough to know much about sex. I guess we might
have kissed once or twice when I walked her home from school. I went on one date with Wanda, if you could even call it a date. There was a banquet held at our church in honor of our basketball
team. Usually we were lucky to finish the season; that year we finished first.
To be honest, Wanda and I were competitors more than girlfriend and boyfriend. There was a stiff competition for grades between the three top girls and the three top boys in our class, and that
meant Wanda, Dorothy Nell Bobbitt, and Alice Bonds against me, Glover, and John Odom. I was still a report card Scott in Jackson, and was an A student through sixth grade.
Though I did well, I didn’t have good study habits. I depended on my memory of the classroom discussions and the notes I would take from the blackboard while the class was going on. But
grades were important, and I took pride in getting good grades. I had a lot to live up to. My mother’s sister Gloria was already teaching English overseas. She’d been in Indonesia and
Israel, and sent me a camel saddle from Egypt. It was the only one in Jackson.
Despite the lack of mementos and photos from those early years, I can reach down into a barrel, it seems, and bring up scraps of yesterdays once tossed aside like gum wrappers. The raw feelings,
like shock or sharp pain, or fear suddenly grabbing your heart, are closest to the top, easiest to reach. They return to me unbidden at times.
I burned the back of my right hand badly on the coal and woodstove that sat like a cast iron Buddha in the living room, my grandmother’s bedroom. Another time I needed a dozen stitches in
my left leg from a frantic slide into third base. I played little league baseball and football and basketball. Shortstop, pitcher, quarterback, pass catcher, guard, imagining I was preparing for
Merry Lane High and Lane College. I remember playing nearly all sports. Except soccer, which we scarcely knew about in Jackson.