In The Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance Page 2

  Initially, I loved school. I learned through history and geography that the world was larger than Lake Charles. I wanted to fit in with the new people I met, but my social ignorance predisposed me to blunders. Once, in the sixth grade, our teacher asked each student to get up and sing his or her favorite song. While the other students sang standard American pop songs and ballads, I stood up and wailed out John Lee Hooker’s gutbucket “Boogie Chillun.” It was met with snickers and laughter. I was a joke.

  It never occurred to my parents to teach us what was expected of us in relation to others, and what we could realistically expect in return. They didn’t talk to me about how to handle problems, deal with girls, or make friends. It never occurred to them that their children should be nurtured at home, encouraged to study, write, and be thoughtful. They saw their duties as disciplining us and providing us with the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, and shelter. They sent us to church and Sunday school, where they expected us to learn right from wrong, and to public school, where they expected we would learn everything else we needed to know about life and the world. They never involved themselves with the PTA, never inquired about what was going on at school. Once, longing to be a part of something, I acted in a school play. My parents didn’t come to see it. After the performance, the other parents rushed over to their children and praised them for doing so well. I felt foolish and awkward standing there alone, and I never acted again. Nor did I go out for sports. I knew it cost money to travel to games. No one had to tell me we couldn’t afford it. I became ever more isolated, more of an outsider. A puny kid, I was often picked on and pushed around by bullies. My shyness and cowardice didn’t help. I grew like an untended weed, without guidance, confronting the world on my own and learning by trial and error.

  My native intelligence, though, allowed me to solve some of my problems. I never had to study. I could walk into a classroom, skim the lesson or listen to the teacher or discussion, and instantly grasp the essentials. I was a straight-A student. Often I would help less intelligent kids by providing them answers for tests or letting them copy mine. They gave me their lunch money in return, but I would have helped them simply for the price of acceptance. I wanted the same things in life that everyone wants: friends, validation, to matter. But I felt I was being told on a daily basis that I didn’t measure up and wasn’t worth bothering with, that I shouldn’t waste time dreaming about the future, that I was an outsider with my nose pressed up against the window of life, through which I saw other people living.

  I took refuge in comic books. My earliest ambition was to be a spaceman like my hero, Flash Gordon. Later, I wanted to be an inventor or a scientist so I could change things, starting with my own life. I received no encouragement from my family. “You better get your head out of them clouds, boy,” my parents would often say.

  I was thirteen when my father’s womanizing finally disrupted my world. My mother and I were driving in the family car to get ice cream when we spotted my father’s motor scooter on the porch of a woman my mother suspected was one of his girlfriends. She pulled over and knocked on the door. After a while, my father came out. He lied about his reason for being there, berated my mother for following him, said he had done nothing wrong. When he got home, he whipped her.

  My mother sought revenge by having a fling of her own. Returning from an out-of-town tryst, the couple had an almost fatal accident that sent my mother to the hospital with broken ribs, internal injuries, and a fractured skull. My dad hovered at her bedside, playing the betrayed but loving and forgiving husband. When she was released from the hospital and came home, that changed.

  She was to get up each morning and serve him breakfast, clean his house, do the laundry, iron his clothes, and have his supper waiting when he returned from work. He expected her to be a wife to him in every way and to be a mother to us kids despite her injuries, which he declared to be her problem, not his. He refused to let me help her as she inched her broken body about the kitchen. Every night, groans of painful sex emanated from their bedroom.

  We were to say nothing of my mother’s ordeal upon threat of whippings. My father presented himself as a victim. He was good at manipulating appearances, mimicking responsibility, courtesy, charitableness, and friendship. He once took me along to a cousin’s funeral in Beaumont, Texas, which he attended reluctantly. On the way, he told me our dead relative had been an “asshole.” He instructed me to observe and learn. When we arrived, he somberly greeted everyone, then we went over to the casket and knelt. He began moving his lips as if in prayer. Then he burst into tears, crying out his cousin’s name, as if overcome with grief. I stood up and stepped back, surprised, staring at my father as others rushed to console him. Between sobs, he babbled about how close he and his cousin had been, how wonderful he had been and how much he would miss him. When we finally got back to the car, he smiled, proud of himself: “Everybody there believes I cared about him. That’s the way you get ahead in the world, son. You always leave people with a good impression.” It was the only time he ever tried to teach me something.

  As we neared home, he told me that he was leaving us, that my mother had cheated on him with another man, that he had tried to overlook it and hold the family together for us kids, but it wasn’t working. He was a terrible father, grossly deficient and brutal, but I was devastated nonetheless.

  His moving out surprised everyone we knew, but it was premeditated. After my mother’s car accident, he had her file an insurance claim for the cost of her injuries. He handled all the negotiations, and after he won a settlement for “a lot of money,” he promptly absconded with it, leaving her penniless and pregnant. We were forced to go on welfare. Then he declared the baby in her womb was not his. Ralph, my youngest brother, grew up to be the spitting image of our father.

  Living on welfare brought a sharp decline in our already modest standard of living. To be sure, there were other poor kids at school, but poverty added to my shame. I focused more on the kids who didn’t need to borrow lunch money from the neighbors or wheel a grocery cart full of dirty, salvaged soft drink bottles into the supermarket for a refund.

  I was in the eighth grade when I burglarized a local Piggly Wiggly supermarket, not to get something I needed but for costume jewelry to give the girls in my class. I was thirteen years old, and girls had come to obsess me, especially since I didn’t seem to impress them very much. I also took about $40 in change to treat the boys in school. I thought I could buy their friendship. My instant popularity faded quickly, and my act of desperation wound up isolating me even more.

  The first burglary was so easy that I returned a second time, and got busted. My father came to get me at the police station. I dreaded his reaction, but he never said a word as he drove me to my mother’s home. The court sent me to a nerdy white psychiatrist for counseling, and he advised me to return to school. The police had questioned some of the students and teachers, so everyone knew about the burglary: I was so ashamed that I eventually stopped going to classes. I opted to hang with the other “problem kids.” We often retreated to the overgrown and neglected cemetery adjacent to the school and passed our time smoking, drinking, and shooting craps on the low-lying tombs hidden among the raised vaults and tall weeds. We’d frequent poolrooms and cafés, swapping lies about ourselves, other kids, and especially girls. It was stupid, aimless activity by stupid, aimless kids, most of whom were destined for short lives. Skinny and socially awkward, I was often the brunt of their jokes, but negative attention was better than none. Most of the kids still in school avoided me. In embracing the street toughs, I had further excluded myself from the world I yearned to be a part of.

  I got a job stocking shelves and bagging groceries at Tramonte’s, a family-owned Italian grocery. The store owner knew I was underage and playing hooky but was willing to overlook it in exchange for cheap labor. I was being exploited, which I didn’t like, but I needed the money; besides which, I had stepped up in the world: I had a job.

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sp; One day my brother Raymond confided that he and a friend had committed a burglary. I agreed to let him tell my mother that he got the money from me, since I had a job. When they got busted, I acknowledged covering for my brother because I saw nothing wrong in what I had done. To my surprise, I was taken to the notorious State Industrial School for Colored Youths, a coed institution outside Baton Rouge, along with my brother and his friend, for an indefinite period.

  Unlike other penal facilities, this one boasted a well-educated staff, ironically the result of racial segregation. Aside from the local colored schools, this institution was the only place in the area where colored educators and social workers, graduates of nearby Southern University, could find employment. But the educational level of the administration did not translate into enlightened leadership. Staff members whipped every kid in the vicinity of a fight, theft, misbehavior, or other wrongdoing, even if they were only seeking information. Shocking tales of cruelty, brutality, and even deaths occasionally appeared in newspapers after someone escaped from the facility, but staffers were seldom held accountable. Louisiana’s all-white government rarely questioned the treatment of colored kids.

  Some of the kids in the reform school were street thugs and gang members who carried their feuds into the facility. Most of the residents, though, were there because they were labeled as “problems” in their communities. Some had been committed by relatives who regarded them as unmanageable. These rejects, some of them innocents, did not like being imprisoned, understandably. I was one of them. I considered myself a victim of that vague, faceless, all-powerful entity coloreds knew simply as “white folks.”

  I simmered in my victimization until I volunteered for a part-time job sorting files and cleaning the office of the chaplain, Reverend West. It was an effort to get closer to Sexy Black, a gorgeous teenage resident I was infatuated with who had a job in the same building. Reverend West was a nice man who took the time to explain that I committed a crime when I lied to help my brother hide the fact that his money came from a burglary. I was an accessory after the fact. I was stunned to learn that I had done something seriously wrong. That knowledge mitigated the bitterness that had begun to build up in me.

  I became a good student and a model inmate. I looked forward to seeing my mom, who visited as frequently as she could. I didn’t try to escape, as others periodically did, nor did I challenge authority.

  I was released after five months. Reverend West advised me to return to school, but my shame at having been in reform school was too great for that.

  “You want a job?” my cousin Mason asked. He was the janitor for an exclusive women’s store at one end of the Southgate Shopping Center in the white section of Lake Charles. A new shop, Halpern’s Fabrics, was opening there soon. Because Mason vouched for me, Halpern’s manager, Martha Irby, a pleasant, fortyish woman, hired me on the spot as janitor and general helper, what in those days was called a “porter.”

  The shopping center was across town from where colored folks lived, and we only went there to work or shop. I had neither a driver’s license nor a car, so I commuted by city bus. The seating was segregated—blacks in the back. Most coloreds who could catch a ride after a day’s work did that rather than run the risk of waiting at the bus stop, especially when it was late and getting dark, when white joyriders would often pass by to holler racial epithets and obscenities or hurl a beer can or Coke bottle from passing cars, laughter trailing behind. If you had to take the bus home, you would try to arrive at the stop almost immediately before the bus’s scheduled arrival.

  Since there was no place for coloreds to eat in south Lake Charles—there were plenty of whites-only cafés—we generally brought sandwiches from home or bought bread and bologna at a supermarket in the shopping center and ate in the rear of the places where we worked. We inhabited two different worlds, sharply divided by race and maintained by tradition, law, fear, and violence. Ours was always substandard and second-class, and we didn’t like it very much.

  I worked six days a week and earned $70 every two weeks—good pay for a colored in a non-construction job in 1959. I had never had so much money. I was able to help out my mother, purchase nice clothes for myself, and renew my efforts to buy myself some “friends.”

  My job introduced me to a world in which what I did mattered. I kept Halpern’s Fabrics clean and served as a general helper, keeping the stock in order, running errands, and doing whatever the four white, middle-aged saleswomen needed me to do. All the women were nice to me, and I treated them with respect. Mrs. Irby, whom I really liked, was unlike any white person I had ever met, treating me with a measure of respect in turn, taking a sincere interest in me. She didn’t like my having quit school and would take time to teach me about the fabrics we handled, sewing, the draperies and home decorating, how to mix paint, operate the cash register, bookkeeping, and the general operation of the business. “You never know when this might one day benefit you,” she’d always say.

  As things turned out, it became a benefit to the store. When the assistant manager left, she was not replaced. Instead, Mrs. Irby asked me to assume some of those duties. I leaped at the chance to demonstrate my knowledge and abilities. I helped with the books, brought deposits to the Gulf National Bank branch, tracked and ordered stock, determined discounts for damaged goods. Mrs. Irby came to rely on me, to the point that she would not go to lunch unless I was there to make sure everything went smoothly in her absence. I became her right hand. She suggested to Alvin Halpern, Jr., the store’s owner, that he give me a 50 percent raise instead of hiring a new assistant manager. She was optimistic he would say yes, since it would translate into a savings for the store. Halpern said good things about my work but gave me a raise of only $2.50 a week. Mrs. Irby was embarrassed. I seethed.

  I felt it was unfair, still another setback. I was fed up with a white society that marginalized me. I brooded about that, and about the fact that I had no real friends, only some people who would become chummy when they hit me up for cash. I felt my life was empty, and I despaired of things ever being different.

  In fact, at that very moment the racial, social, and legal barriers separating the races in Louisiana were being challenged. On February 15, 1961, Governor Jimmy “You Are My Sunshine” Davis called the all-white Louisiana legislature into its fifth consecutive special session to wrestle with the issue of school desegregation. Ever since 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” school systems unconstitutional, the Louisiana government had been trying desperately to block the racial integration of its public schools. Legislators pandered to the prejudices of the white majority who wanted to keep their traditional way of life intact. The solution lawmakers hit upon bore witness to a public mood of near hysteria among whites: Rather than allow colored kids into the white schools, the legislature passed a bill to close the state’s public schools and put the buildings up for sale. The governor approved it. A federal court blocked it.

  I was oblivious to what was happening at the capitol, 125 miles from Lake Charles, just as I was oblivious to Harper Lee’s searingly accurate portrait of Southern justice in To Kill a Mockingbird, her best-selling novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. My small world revolved around the latest dance steps, my next new suit of clothes, and girls. I read neither newspapers nor books, and I didn’t watch television. I didn’t know who the governor of Louisiana was, much less what the legislature was doing.

  For me, the most significant thing about February 15, 1961, was that it was payday. I cashed my check at the bank and, at lunchtime, caught the back of the bus to Waldmeier’s Pawn Shop downtown, a couple of miles away. I made my way to the rear of the shop, where the handguns were kept. I’d been thinking off and on about getting a gun for several months. I was a puny nineteen-year-old who weighed less than 120 pounds. I’d been picked on, bullied, and harassed throughout my life, and I was tired of it. What pushed me over the edge was having been slapped and threatened in front of others at a ni
ghtclub by a guy with a knife a week earlier. As I walked back home that night, fuming, I vowed that would never happen again.

  Many of my buddies had knives, but no one had a gun. I had never held, much less fired, one. I studied a .22 caliber with a price tag of $14.95. It was small enough to carry in my pocket, concealed. I had never been violent and did not want to hurt anyone. I was buying the weapon to intimidate people. I didn’t expect ever to fire the gun; I felt just pulling it out would resolve any problem I faced and, as word spread, the knowledge that I carried a pistol would deter people from trying to push me around.

  The pawnshop owner bagged the firearm and handed it to me. I began walking toward the front door of the store when a hunting knife in a scabbard caught my eye—a cheap, ordinary knife priced at $2. I bought it on impulse and walked out. I caught the bus back to the area where I worked and bought a box of .22 caliber cartridges at an army surplus store. Then I wandered back to work.

  I got to work about nine the next morning, the weapons still in my coat pocket. I swept the floor of the shop and the sidewalk out front, cleaned the toilet, then straightened bolts of fabric and other products throughout the store. This was my future—a dead-end job. I was restless. I felt a gnawing need for things to change.

  I had a week’s vacation coming, starting Monday. I’d heard California was a good place for colored people, with plenty of opportunities for good jobs and a chance to be somebody. But the trip would require more money than I had.