Growing Up (25 page)

For all this I had Mary Leslie and Herb to thank, but though I loved Mary dearly, my heart was still hardened against Herb,
and, ignoring his responsibility for granting me such luxury, I felt only resentment toward him for being the agent of my happiness. I’d never seen my mother more radiantly happy than the day we moved in. The house was on Marydell Road in the Irvington section of Baltimore. For my mother it was that “home of our own” she had talked about from my earliest memory. It was the place of permanence, the permanence embodied for her in the word “home.” She was to live there for the next thirty-five years.

“S
OMETHING
will come along.”

That became my mother’s battle cry as I plowed into the final year of high school. Friends began asking her what Russell planned to do when he graduated, and her answer was, “Something will come along.” She didn’t know what, and nothing was in sight on the horizon, but she’d survived so long now on faith that something always came along for people who did their best. “Russ hasn’t made up his mind yet, but something will come along,” she told people.

I saw no possibilities and looked forward to the end of school days with increasing glumness. It was assumed I would get a job. Boys of our economic class didn’t ordinarily go to college. My education, however, hadn’t fitted me for labor. While I was reading the Romantic poets and learning Latin syntax, practical boys had been taking shop, mechanical drawing, accounting, and typing. I couldn’t drive a nail without mashing my thumb. When I mentioned my inadequacies to my mother she said, “Something will come along, Buddy.”

If, gloomily, I said, “Fat chance,” she snapped at me, “For
God’s sake, Russell, have a little gumption. Look on the bright side.”

I didn’t mind the prospect of working. Having worked since I was eight, I had acquired the habit of work, but I was stymied about what kind of full-time work I might be fit for. That winter I was trying to muster enthusiasm for a career in the grocery business. Moving from Lombard Street to Marydell Road, I had lost my newspaper route. To make up the lost income I’d taken a Saturday job at a large grocery in the Hollins Market, which paid $14 for twelve hours’ work. It was a “self-service” store, a primitive forerunner of the supermarket, the first expression of an idea whose time had not yet come. Situated in a dilapidated old building where groceries had once been sold, old-style, across the counter, it bore little resemblance to the bulging supermonuments to consumption that were to rise after World War II. There was no air-conditioning in summer and little heat in winter. Under the cellar’s cobwebbed rafters an occasional rat scurried among sacks of cornmeal and hundred-pound bags of flour. As a stock clerk, I toted merchandise from the cellar, marked its price in black crayon, and stacked it on shelves for Saturday shoppers. The flour sacks were slung over the shoulder and lugged upstairs to be dipped from with an aluminum scoop on demand.

The manager was Mr. Simmons, a bawdy, exuberant slave driver who had learned the business in the days of over-the-counter selling, when a manager’s personality could attract customers or turn them away. Simmons was a tall, square-shouldered man who affected the breezy style, as though he’d studied his trade under burlesque comedians. His head was as round and hairless as a cannon ball. He wore big horn-rimmed glasses and bow ties, and his mouth, which was wide and frequently open from ear to ear, displayed dazzling rows of teeth so big they would have done credit to a horse.

Throughout the day the store was filled with his roars, guffaws, shouted jokes, and curses. He romped the aisles in a Groucho Marx lope, administering tongue lashings when he discovered empty shelves where the canned tomatoes or the Post Toasties or
the Ovaltine were supposed to be. Spotting a handsome woman at the meat counter, he might glide behind the hamburger grinder to whisper sotto voce some dirty joke at the butcher’s ear, then glare at the woman, part his mouth from ear to ear, and display his magnificent ivory. The store was his stage, and he treated it as if he were its star, director, producer, and owner.

If there was a dull half hour he might creep up behind one of the stock clerks hoisting oatmeal from crate to shelf, goose him with both thumbs, then gallop away roaring with laughter. Many of the customers were black and poor and arrived late on Saturday nights hoping to have their paychecks cashed. With them Simmons played Simon Legree, examining their checks suspiciously, demanding identification papers, then rejecting some damp proffered document as inadequate. “That damn thing is so dirty I don’t even want to touch it. You open it up and show it to me.” Or, if the credentials were in order: “I don’t know whether I’m going to cash this check or not. How much do you want to buy here?”

Simmons boasted of being a great lecher. In the cellar ceiling he had drilled a small hole through which he could look up the skirts of women customers standing at the cash register overhead. When a woman who pleased his fancy entered the store, he ostentatiously departed for the cellar with some such cry as “Hot damn! I’ve got to see more of this.” Rolling his eyeballs and smacking his lips he plunged into the cellar and could be found there standing on a pile of flour sacks, one eye glued to his peephole.

I wasn’t exhilarated by the grocery business, but at least I was getting experience I thought might help me get full-time work at it after high school. For this purpose I wanted to learn to work the cash register so I could become a checker, the most glamorous job in the store except for the manager’s. Simmons withheld this prize. At some point I’d made the mistake of trying to show him I was fancily educated, thinking this would move him to promote me from cellar labor. Whether he took me for an overeducated young fool or whether he resented my failure to laugh loudly enough at his jokes, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I waited in vain for my chance to work the cash register. I knew I would never get it
when Simmons, desperate one day for help at the cash registers, came down to the cellar, passed me by, and called on Earl to do the job. Earl was black, and black people were contemptible to Simmons but still preferable to me. It made me wonder if I was cut out for the grocery business. But on the other hand, what else was there?

The only thing that truly interested me was writing, and I knew that sixteen-year-olds did not come out of high school and become writers. I thought of writing as something to be done only by the rich. It was so obviously not real work, not a job at which you could earn a living. Still, I had begun to think of myself as a writer. It was the only thing for which I seemed to have the smallest talent, and, silly though it sounded when I told people I’d like to be a writer, it gave me a way of thinking about myself which satisfied my need to have an identity.

The notion of becoming a writer had flickered off and on in my head since the Belleville days, but it wasn’t until my third year in high school that the possibility took hold. Until then I’d been bored by everything associated with English courses. I found English grammar dull and baffling. I hated the assignments to turn out “compositions,” and went at them like heavy labor, turning out leaden, lackluster paragraphs that were agonies for teachers to read and for me to write. The classics thrust on me to read seemed as deadening as chloroform.

When our class was assigned to Mr. Fleagle for third-year English I anticipated another grim year in that dreariest of subjects. Mr. Fleagle was notorious among City students for dullness and inability to inspire. He was said to be stuffy, dull, and hopelessly out of date. To me he looked to be sixty or seventy and prim to a fault. He wore primly severe eyeglasses, his wavy hair was primly cut and primly combed. He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a comic antique.

I anticipated a listless, unfruitful year with Mr. Fleagle and
for a long time was not disappointed. We read
Macbeth
. Mr. Fleagle loved
Macbeth
and wanted us to love it too, but he lacked the gift of infecting others with his own passion. He tried to convey the murderous ferocity of Lady Macbeth one day by reading aloud the passage that concludes

The idea of prim Mr. Fleagle plucking his nipple from boneless gums was too much for the class. We burst into gasps of irrepressible snickering. Mr. Fleagle stopped.

“There is nothing funny, boys, about giving suck to a babe. It is the—the very essence of motherhood, don’t you see.”

He constantly sprinkled his sentences with “don’t you see.” It wasn’t a question but an exclamation of mild surprise at our ignorance. “Your pronoun needs an antecedent, don’t you see,” he would say, very primly. “The purpose of the Porter’s scene, boys, is to provide comic relief from the horror, don’t you see.”

Late in the year we tackled the informal essay. “The essay, don’t you see, is the …” My mind went numb. Of all forms of writing, none seemed so boring as the essay. Naturally we would have to write informal essays. Mr. Fleagle distributed a homework sheet offering us a choice of topics. None was quite so simpleminded as “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” but most seemed to be almost as dull. I took the list home and dawdled until the night before the essay was due. Sprawled on the sofa, I finally faced up to the grim task, took the list out of my notebook, and scanned it. The topic on which my eye stopped was “The Art of Eating Spaghetti.”

This title produced an extraordinary sequence of mental images. Surging up out of the depths of memory came a vivid recollection of a night in Belleville when all of us were seated around the supper table—Uncle Allen, my mother, Uncle Charlie, Doris,
Uncle Hal—and Aunt Pat served spaghetti for supper. Spaghetti was an exotic treat in those days. Neither Doris nor I had ever eaten spaghetti, and none of the adults had enough experience to be good at it. All the good humor of Uncle Allen’s house reawoke in my mind as I recalled the laughing arguments we had that night about the socially respectable method for moving spaghetti from plate to mouth.

Suddenly I wanted to write about that, about the warmth and good feeling of it, but I wanted to put it down simply for my own joy, not for Mr. Fleagle. It was a moment I wanted to recapture and hold for myself. I wanted to relive the pleasure of an evening at New Street. To write it as I wanted, however, would violate all the rules of formal composition I’d learned in school, and Mr. Fleagle would surely give it a failing grade. Never mind. I would write something else for Mr. Fleagle after I had written this thing for myself.

When I finished it the night was half gone and there was no time left to compose a proper, respectable essay for Mr. Fleagle. There was no choice next morning but to turn in my private reminiscence of Belleville. Two days passed before Mr. Fleagle returned the graded papers, and he returned everyone’s but mine. I was bracing myself for a command to report to Mr. Fleagle immediately after school for discipline when I saw him lift my paper from his desk and rap for the class’s attention.

“Now, boys,” he said, “I want to read you an essay. This is titled ‘The Art of Eating Spaghetti.’ “

And he started to read. My words! He was reading
my words
out loud to the entire class. What’s more, the entire class was listening. Listening attentively. Then somebody laughed, then the entire class was laughing, and not in contempt and ridicule, but with openhearted enjoyment. Even Mr. Fleagle stopped two or three times to repress a small prim smile.

I did my best to avoid showing pleasure, but what I was feeling was pure ecstasy at this startling demonstration that my words had the power to make people laugh. In the eleventh grade,
at the eleventh hour as it were, I had discovered a calling. It was the happiest moment of my entire school career. When Mr. Fleagle finished he put the final seal on my happiness by saying, “Now that, boys, is an essay, don’t you see. It’s—don’t you see—it’s of the very essence of the essay, don’t you see. Congratulations, Mr. Baker.”

For the first time, light shone on a possibility. It wasn’t a very heartening possibility, to be sure. Writing couldn’t lead to a job after high school, and it was hardly honest work, but Mr. Fleagle had opened a door for me. After that I ranked Mr. Fleagle among the finest teachers in the school.

My mother was almost as delighted as I when I showed her Mr. Fleagle’s A-Plus and described my triumph. Hadn’t she always said I had a talent for writing? “Now if you work hard at it, Buddy, you can make something of yourself.”

I didn’t see how. As the final year of high school neared its end and it began to seem that even the grocery business was beyond me, my mother was also becoming worried. She’d hoped for years that something would come along to enable me to go to college. All those years she had kept the door open on the possibility that she might turn me into a man of letters. When I was in eighth grade she’d spent precious pennies to subscribe to mail-order bargains in the classics. “World’s Greatest Literature,” retailing at 39 cents a volume, came in the mail every month, books that stunned me with boredom.
The Last of the Mohicans, Ben Hur, Westward Ho, Vanity Fair, Ivanhoe
. Unread, her attempts to cultivate my literary tastes gathered dust under my bed, but it comforted her to know I had them at my fingertips.

She also subscribed on my behalf to the
Atlantic Monthly
and
Harper’s
. “The best magazines in America,” she said. “That’s where you’ll find real writers.” The best magazines in America also piled up unread and unreadable in my bedroom. I seemed cut out to serve neither literature nor its bastard offspring, journalism, until my great coup in Mr. Fleagle’s English class. Then her hopes revived.