Traveling Soul (4 page)

The family lived on the run, chased by creditors and landlords from one seedy flophouse to the next. Being a poor Negro in Chicago meant you rarely got a sense of belonging anywhere. After Mannish deserted the family, they lived in a dingy apartment on South Washtenaw Avenue, where Marion began dating a man named Eddie who abused her. One of Aunt Carolyn's earliest memories is scrambling up the fire escape to Grandma Sadie's apartment, which was just above theirs, and begging her to come down and stop Eddie from hitting Marion. “Mama was kind of on the timid side, and Grandma was just very boisterous,” Aunt Carolyn says. “Mama wasn't a fighter, but Grandma was. And [Eddie] didn't mess with Grandma. Grandma ended up putting him out.”

Sadie was often the family's only refuge. “She was always around,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “She was Mom's backbone.” Not affectionate by nature, Sadie possessed the kind of steel will necessary to survive the Chicago
slums. She worked all day cooking in rich white people's kitchens, and at night she often brought home food her employers didn't eat to feed her daughter and grandchildren. Many times she saved them from starvation.

At home, young Curtis watched his mother get beaten; at school, he took the beatings. With a cruelty special to children, his classmates roughed him up and zeroed in on his every imperfection. They mocked his poverty, although they were most likely poor too. They picked on him because of his short stature and big teeth. Perhaps most hurtful, they made fun of him because of his dark skin. He'd never forget the derogatory nickname they slung at him like a stone—Smut. They used the word in its original sense, meaning a dark stain or blot. This bred in him insecurities that would take decades to shake.

Soon, Marion left Eddie and moved the family to the White Eagle, a decaying hotel on Eighteenth Street between Indiana and Michigan Avenues. Of all the cheap digs, the White Eagle haunted my father's memory most. He recalled it as a dark, dreary joint where hookers stalked the sidewalk day and night, and many more lived in the neighborhood nearby. He never saw a pimp at the time, though. “I guess pimps are a luxury of wealthier neighborhoods,” he said later.

Outside, trash choked the sidewalk and broken windows made the building's face leer like a jack-o-lantern's smile. Inside, prostitutes, dope pushers, and drug fiends lived on one side, while poor families huddled on the other—mostly single mothers struggling to raise their children in the jaws of nighttime's vices. At the White Eagle, the whole family lived in a single room the size of a postage stamp. Marion slept on a let-out sofa bed, and the children shared a bunk bed, Curtis on top, Carolyn, Kenny, and Kirby down below.

Their floor had eight units but only one communal bathroom, so young Curtis had to trudge out to the hall to use it, not unlike Annie Bell's beaten path to the outhouse in Louisiana. The bathroom was a nightmare—putrid, cramped, filthy, full of exposed pipes and crumbling
walls. Residents stuffed newspapers into crevices to stanch water leaks, while exposed light bulbs dangled from dangerous wires overhead.

Life in the White Eagle reflected the building's shabby state. Most nights, Curtis and family went to bed hungry and woke up itching from bedbug bites. As Aunt Carolyn remembers, “Many Christmases, we didn't have anything. Mama would fix corn bread and a bowl of sugar to make syrup. We thought it was a treat, but that's all she had.” Grandma Sadie moved into the building, as did Marion's siblings, Uncle Son and Aunt Edith. Having family close by did nothing to make the White Eagle a homier place, though. At age seven, Aunt Carolyn narrowly escaped a pervert trying to lure her into the bathroom.

Under such duress, my dad had to grow up fast. He lived in a world that snuffed out innocence, a world that forbade the luxury of childhood. At age five, he became the man of the house through no choice of his own. The word “man” is instructive here—there's no such thing as child of the house. When Marion wasn't around, Curtis exerted control like an adult, and he got used to having others look to him for that control. As Aunt Carolyn says, “If anything went on, we looked to him if Mama wasn't there because he was the oldest one around at that time.” It fit his natural tendencies as a Gemini, and for much of his life, if he couldn't control something completely, he wouldn't do it.

Marion's situation taught him the dangers of living without control. At the same time, she also taught him about the strength of the spirit to survive, and the importance of art as a way to manage despair. She couldn't provide creature comforts, but she kept the family respectable through sheer force of will and artistic talent. Whatever clothes she couldn't afford, she could knit, sew, or crochet just as well. She also loved working at puzzles—jigsaw and crossword—and she always had a book in hand, which provided endless entertainment for her children. She'd tell them stories from the books she read, and often she'd recite her favorite Dunbar poems, like “How Lucy Backslid”:

De times is mighty stirrin' ‘mong de people up ouah way
,

Dey ‘sputin' an' dey argyin' an' fussin' night an' day;

An' all dis monst'ous trouble dat hit meks me tiahed to tell

Is ‘bout dat Lucy Jackson dat was sich a mighty belle
.

She was de preachah's favoured, an' he tol' de chu'ch one night

Dat she travelled thoo de cloud o' sin a–bearin' of a light;

But, now, I ‘low he t'inkin' dat she mus' ‘a' los' huh lamp
,

Case Lucy done backslided an' dey trouble in de camp
.

The stanzas churned around young Curtis's mind, powerfully influencing his sense of rhythm and rhyme. While Dunbar's poetry left a mark on my dad, it also eased his transition into a world that would force him to have two identities. Dunbar's work is mixed, with some poems written in formal English verse and others, like “Lucy,” written in Negro dialect. This dual identity as a poet struck at the heart of Negro existence in America. It represented an artistic expression of a phenomenon that DuBois, at roughly the same time as Dunbar's writing, called “double-consciousness.” DuBois wrote:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness…. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost … He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Double-consciousness held true for every station of Negro life. From the common laborer to the most successful celebrity, all had to be proficient in two languages, two ways of acting, two modes of dress, two sets of rules—one for the white world, one for the Negro. As Curtis grew,
he encountered these two worlds. Often the encounter was silent and subconscious, like listening to his mother recite Dunbar's poems in two voices. Within a few years, however, the encounters would grow deafening as the worlds crashed together.

For now, my father kept to himself, like his mother and Annie Bell. Quiet and solitary, he preferred doing most things alone—he'd remain that way even as a world-famous musician. Marion recalled, “When other children came by to play, Curtis would tell them he was on punishment and couldn't have any company.” When the other kids left, he'd break open a box of crayons and lose himself in drawing.

Still, he had a deep curiosity about the world. He plied his mother with questions, wanting to know how everything worked, and where, and when. His favorite question, though, was, “Why?” Even if he knew the answer, he still asked why. It seemed a magical question, always producing new perspectives.

He also had a keen interest in music. During his youth, the smooth sounds of Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, and Dinah Washington poured from the radio like honey, salving the wounds of a war-weary nation. At the same time, a new movement of jazz musicians flouted the unwritten code that a Negro performer mustn't ever threaten the status quo. Miles Davis led the pack, and whatever anyone thought of him, he “took no shit off of nobody,” as he often said, white or Negro. Living in blues central, Curtis also heard the plaintive moans of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and others who electrified nightclub stages down the street from his home.

Curtis meanwhile took his own first steps on a different kind of stage. As Marion remembered it, “He used to stand on the tree stump in front of my grandmother's house in Du Quoin, Illinois, and sing ‘Pistol-packing Mama' to the engineers driving the trains by.” He was a born performer, and no poverty or hardship could take away my grandmother's joy at watching her eldest son strut across a tree trunk with the confidence only a child can feel.

Marion also had a voracious appetite for music, listening to opera, classical, country, gospel, and rhythm and blues at home. She had a collection
of gospel records she played from her dusty old Victrola while Curtis peeked his little head over the turntable's edge, watching the black-and-white Specialty Records labels turn in hypnotic circles.

Specialty singers like Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones ingrained Almighty God in the grooves of their records. Jeter's lilting falsetto—the precursor to my father's vocal style, and inspiration for legions of doo-wop singers—gave sound to the human soul. When that soul-sound bounced off the White Eagle's grimy walls, the unfathomable took fleeting shape in Curtis's mind. Only music had this divine, ecstatic power, and my father was enthralled. He'd found a love as intimate as his own skin.

My grandmother raised her family gently and respectfully. “She was a reasonable mother,” my father recalled, “a woman of mentality, of mind, that could talk, express herself.” Despite her expressive mind, however, her financial situation remained dire. On Kenny's fourth birthday, she gave him a quarter and asked him not to tell Curtis or Carolyn because that was all the money she had. Annie Bell offered little help, and Mannish had remarried a few times. He fathered more children (who were given the surname Washington, after the new name he took when he went AWOL), leaving him with fewer reasons to think about his first family. “I never will forget this one Christmas,” Aunt Carolyn says. “[Mannish] came over and brought a basket of food and it had a doll in it. This basket of food, that's how we happened to have a Christmas meal, and I finally got a doll for Christmas. That's when he was with his third wife, Gracie … and he and Gracie were having an argument. They were arguing because the basket of food was not supposed to come to us. It was supposed to go over to [my half sisters] Tanya and Ann's house, but they weren't home. So he brought it to us. I was so upset, when I got home, I took the doll and broke the head off. I remember throwing it because it wasn't meant for us.”

While Mannish continued to ignore the family, depression gnawed at Marion like an open sore. Sometimes the children heard her crying alone in her room at night because she had nothing to feed them. Curtis and his siblings made a game of it the way children do, filling their little
bellies with water and jiggling it around just to hear the noise of something inside other than hunger pangs. Otherwise, they'd squeak by with canned food, and powdered milk, and salad-dressing sandwiches until Marion's relief check came again.

When it came, she had twenty-five dollars to feed her family for the next month. She had to stock up on staples, but every once in a while she'd buy some popcorn, pop it up, and gather the family around the table, telling the children stories from her books as they munched away. Or, she'd splurge by taking Carolyn down to Woolworth's and buying a banana split. No matter how much she needed every red cent, she knew sometimes it was a mother's duty to pamper her children.