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| ISBN-13: | 9781466895744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/29/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 389 KB |
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Woodholme
A Black Man's Story of Growing Up Alone
By DeWayne Wickham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1995 DeWayne WickhamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9574-4
CHAPTER 1
The approach was a narrow, tree-lined lane that peeled off Reisterstown Road with little notice. The only warning motorists got was a small, one-word sign near the point where the two roadways merged that simply — no, make that discreetly — announced its destination: Woodholme.
It was the spring of 1961, and I was only fourteen the first time I made the trip up that winding passage to the Jewish country club on the hilltop above. My stomach growled loudly as I took those first uncertain steps toward Woodholme. It always growled around breakfast time. And most days there was nothing I could do to quiet it. This one was no different, since I was only able to scrounge up enough money for the one-way bus fare to Woodholme.
For much of the way up the road, the private country club's physical structures and its lush golf course were hidden from view by a thicket of trees. I'd not been to a golf course before, nor, for that matter, a country club. And with the exception of a few visits to Druid Hill Park, the huge public domain that was then the demarcation line between white and black Baltimore, in much the same way that New York's Central Park now separates wealthy whites on its south side from poor blacks and Hispanics to the north, I had not seen anything that compared to this warmly bucolic setting.
Interspersed among the lines of oak and maple trees that stood like sentries along the way to Woodholme, the dogwoods and wildflowers were in bloom. The sky was a deeper blue than the one that hung low over the home I'd left behind that morning. And it was sweet with the smell of country air and full of what was for me the unfamiliar sound of birds chirping.
The steady flow of cars up the roadway forced me to walk along its grassy edge. Nobody stopped to offer me a ride. That was my fault because, as I was soon to learn, club members routinely offered a lift to people they found hiking up the road. But not me, at least not on this morning. I didn't want a ride and they probably sensed as much. Most of the way up the road, I hugged the tree line and avoided making eye contact with the drivers who passed me by. I didn't want to get into their cars, having suddenly become self-conscious about the way I looked.
My khaki pants were threadbare and a couple of days overdue for a good washing. My shirt collar was thick with the crust of dried perspiration and its armpits were badly stained. Still, when I left home that morning I thought I looked just fine. But the closer I got to Woodholme — this country retreat for wealthy Jews — the more uncomfortable I became with my appearance, a feeling that only got worse as I made my way up the road.
* * *
The ground beneath my feet was wet with the morning dew, which quickly became something of an annoyance as the moisture seeped into my badly worn Converse sneakers. Soon the squishy sound of water-soaked socks pressing against damp rubber soles broke the morning's natural symphony, and slowed my step. It was a little after 7 a.m. when I approached the ridge where the road turns gently to the right, wrapping around the back of a grassy knoll. It was there that I got my first glimpse of Woodholme's golf course.
"Damn" was all I could manage to mutter in amazement at what I saw. From where I stood, the golf course stretched out in three directions. It was a sprawling oasis of trees and well-manicured grass like nothing I had ever seen. A maze of hills and valleys connected by long, narrow strips of turf crisscrossed the great expanse of land that unfolded before me.
In the distance, there was a small stream. Closer by, several poorly formed circles, filled with milk-white sand, cut into the ground. They surrounded a mass of grass packed so tightly, and cut so closely, that it resembled a fine green carpet. Near its center, a little white flag bearing the number 7 flew from a pole that rose up out of a small hole.
Ahead of me, the parking lot was already beginning to fill with the late-model cars of club members arriving for an early round of golf, or game of tennis. They were Cadillacs and Lincolns mostly. But here and there I saw a Jaguar. Next to the wooden booth the parking-lot attendants manned sat a Rolls-Royce.
Off to the left of the parking lot was the clubhouse, a grand, sprawling building with a circular driveway and columned entrance that gave the place the look of the southern plantation I'd seen years earlier when my father took me to the movies to see Gone With the Wind.
By now the road was wide enough that I could escape the wet grass without fear of being run down by a passing motorist. On the blacktop, the watery sound of my sneakers was even more pronounced. Every step I took left an imprint behind me on the road's surface. As I walked awkwardly past the clubhouse, a steady stream of cars circled under the building's portico. There three black men — each in his early twenties — took turns chauffeuring cars to a parking space.
Even in the cool spring morning air, the men sweated profusely as they hurried to park one car and then raced back to the clubhouse for another. As they ran past me I could hear the sound of coins jangling. Their pockets bulged with the tips already earned in a workday that was just beginning. One of the men, a tall, pocked-faced man with processed hair, slowed as he approached me.
"Hey, man, where do you go to caddie?" I asked him.
"Over there, through the parking lot and down the path," he answered, jabbing his arm over his shoulder in the general direction of the parking lot from which he had just emerged.
Weaving my way through the parked cars, I found a small asphalt walkway on the other side of the now nearly full lot. The path snaked down through a row of trees and shrubbery to the golf pro shop, a small one-story brick building that was tucked neatly behind the first tee, the starting point for each round of golf. A steady flow of white men in brightly colored clothes and spiked shoes went into the building and then quickly reappeared and headed toward the first tee.
The pro shop was a combination golf store and control central for Woodholme's golfers. Its operation was managed by the club's professional golfer. He was a teaching pro, not one of those professional golfers who go about the country competing in tournaments for prize money like Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus. Teaching pros trade the chance for fame and fortune for the security of a steady job and the celebrity that comes with being the country club's resident golf professional. At private clubs like Woodholme, the golf pro is the big fish in the little pond.
As I neared the door to the pro shop I found myself in an even larger sea of white faces. Strangely, they took little notice of me, increasing my discomfort and making my steps less certain. Desperately my eyes searched for a friendly face — a black face. Then I heard the voice.
"Hey, where ya goin'?" it called out to me. The gravelly voice pierced the crowd around me like one of those whistles that dogs hear but humans don't. I was the only one who seemed to notice. Thirty feet away, on the other side of a cinder block wall, an old black man glared at me as though I were about to break some cardinal rule. No doubt about it, if looks could kill, this guy had the face of an assassin.
Henry Thomas was the senior caddie at Woodholme. His small frame, bent low by years of backbreaking labor, disguised the lean, muscular body of a man half his years — an age no one knew for sure, but which rumor put at sixty-something. His skin was black as soot and his hands, calloused, with fingernails that resembled acorns, looked as if they belonged to a blacksmith.
Pop Henry — that's what people called him — knew all of Woodholme's rules of behavior, one of which I was about to violate. The pro shop was off limits to caddies. At Woodholme there were no written rules for caddies, at least none of which I was ever made aware. No, the do's and don'ts that governed our behavior were passed along down a hierarchy from club officials to the golf pro and then to the caddie master, the overseer of Woodholme's caddies.
From that point, Pop Henry just kind of took it upon himself to see to it that the rest of us — by that I mean the black caddies — didn't mess up. He wasn't about to try to tell white folks, even the poor whites who came to Woodholme to caddie, what they could and couldn't do. But on my first day at the Jewish country club, Pop Henry was quick to lecture me.
"I'm here to caddie," I answered the old man.
"Well, boy, if you wanna work here you betta learn to keep yo' mouth shut, steer clear of dat pro shop, and stay outta white folks' way," he said.
Then, with a flick of his head to direct me, he snapped, "Now git down dere in the caddie shack wit everybody else."
The caddie shack was a single room that clung to the side of the pro shop like a barnacle to the hull of a ship. It had the unmistakable look of something that just didn't belong there. From a distance it appeared to be a dark, brooding place — a dank holding pen for those who daily came to work as porters for the golfers of Woodholme Country Club.
"Where you from, boy?" Pop Henry called out to me, halting my move toward the door that opened into the caddie shack.
"Cherry Hill," I answered.
"Damn, y'all tryin' take over, ain't cha?" he deadpanned. "We got too many of you ole po'-ass niggas out here already."
And more would come.
* * *
Cherry Hill was a maze of mostly public housing, with a sprinkling of federally subsidized apartments and low-cost, privately owned homes. As big-city housing projects go, it didn't have the stark and chilling look of Brooklyn's Fort Greene, or Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, concrete jungles with rows upon rows of high-rise apartments that punctuate the isolation of the people who live in them.
Cherry Hill is different. It consists mostly of two-story town houses spread out over four hundred acres of land. There's a sprinkling of three-story apartment buildings, but nothing as frightening as the two-mile-long line of twenty- eight-story public housing units that line Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway. For me and the other young black boys who found our way to Woodholme in the early 1960s, the country club was an escape from Cherry Hill — an escape from a life of poverty and despair, and a chance to bring home more money every week than most of the adults we knew could earn legally in seven days. I'd heard about this cash cow called Woodholme from a friend and I wanted to milk it for all I could get. It didn't matter much to me that it took two buses and a long walk up a winding road to get there. That was the easiest part of a tortuous journey that started nearly seven years earlier on the morning of December 17, 1954.
CHAPTER 2I don't remember much about my third-grade year other than the day I raced from school carrying an envelope full of photographs. Instead of heading home, I took off in the opposite direction. South on Francis Street for about half a block and then a quick right into the alley I often used as a shortcut to the place where my mother worked.
It was Thursday, December 16, 1954. Christmas was a little more than a week away, and my mother, one of two sales clerks — both of them black — was busy with a customer when I burst through the door and into the clothing store of Isidor Cooper.
* * *
Isidor Cooper straddled two worlds. A chain-smoker with trembling hands, he was the son of a Jewish immigrant who fled czarist Russia around the turn of the century and settled in Baltimore among the city's growing population of eastern European Jews. In 1948 he opened a small clothing store on the northernmost edge of the city's black business district. It was, to be sure, an upscale shop. Still, Mr. Cooper managed to keep his prices well within the reach of his clientele of mostly working-class black women. He wanted the store to be a place of quality that his black customers could afford, he often said. And it was.
But that wasn't the only reason people came to his shop. Isidor Cooper was generous to a fault — a real soft touch. He often let customers buy on credit, even when their credit record argued against such a decision. "I know the honest ones," he would say. At times, people came to his store looking for a loan, rather than clothing. Even then, he seldom turned anyone away empty-handed. At closing time it was not unusual for Mr. Cooper to offer a female customer a ride home. "You shouldn't walk the streets alone after dark," he'd tell a late shopper, sounding as concerned as any doting father. And then this kindly Jewish merchant would give the woman a ride home.
Once, when I went to his store to ask my mother for five cents to buy some candy, Mr. Cooper overheard her tell me she didn't have any money. Pulling me aside, he asked if I thought I was old enough to assemble some boxes for him. Piled high in one corner of the store were the thin cardboard sheets that folded into the boxes used to package the clothes he sold.
"Sure!" I answered.
"Well, you fold those boxes for me," he said, "and I'll pay you five cents."
Minutes later I walked the half block to the five-and-dime store with the nickel I'd earned and bought a bag of candy. From then on, I had a job. Every day after school I'd go to his store, find an out-of-the-way place on the floor near a rack of clothes, and fold boxes. It was a job one of his employees easily could have done any time business slowed, but Mr. Cooper always let that work await my arrival. And when the job was done, he'd give me a nickel — a payment I quickly converted into a bag of candy corn or jelly beans.
Mr. Cooper's clothing store was located on Pennsylvania Avenue, a two-mile stretch of urban sprawl that was the social and cultural hub of Baltimore's black community. At its upper end, Pennsylvania Avenue becomes Reisterstown Road, a main thoroughfare through Baltimore's Jewish community. People used to jokingly say, "Pennsylvania Avenue is the longest road in the world, because it connects Africa to Israel."
The linkage between blacks and Jews in Baltimore was more than just tongue-in-cheek. At the turn of the century they were tightly tied to each other by discriminatory housing patterns that forced poor Russian Jews to live in close proximity to poor blacks in southern and eastern sections of the city. Many of the merchants who operated businesses in these neighborhoods were Jewish. Over time, the Jews moved out of these ghettoes, but the merchants, like Isidor Cooper, remained for decades.
The point where Africa connected to Israel became a moving target as the outmigration of Jews from Baltimore's inner city and the trailing presence of blacks constantly shifted the intersection of the two communities. By 1954 they joined at the corner of Reisterstown Road and Pennsylvania Avenue.
At the lower end of Pennsylvania Avenue were most of the juke joints and nightclubs that were the favorite haunts of Baltimore's blacks, as well as a nightly lure for others from as far away as Washington and Philadelphia. It was there that places like Ike Dixon's Comedy Club and the Watusi and Millionaire clubs stood within walking distance of the Royal Theater.
The Royal was Baltimore's link in a loosely knit network of playhouses, called the "chitlins circuit," that consisted mostly of stops in northern cities: places like the Uptown, in Philadelphia; the Howard, in Washington; the Regal, in Chicago; the Royal; and, of course, the Apollo, in New York.
Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and Dinah Washington all performed at the Royal during the forties and fifties. Sammy Davis, Jr., used to dance on its stage alongside his father and uncle, before he became well known as a singer.
The early sixties brought James Brown, Carla Thomas, Lloyd Price, Martha and the Vandellas, Otis Redding, Maxine Brown, and a long list of other "race music" performers to the Royal. Comedy was also a big part of the shows that played the Royal. Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham, and Redd Foxx appeared there often.
Pennsylvania Avenue saw its heyday during the years preceding the social integration that followed passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Back then, the lower end of Pennsylvania Avenue overflowed day and night with black folks. Hustlers. Church people. Pimps and their whores. And panhandlers, too. But mostly there was a broad cross section of working-class blacks — teachers, steelworkers, cabdrivers, and even preachers — prowling the lower end of Pennsylvania Avenue in search of a day's shopping, or a night's entertainment.
The upper end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where Isidor Cooper's clothing store was located, differed from the lower part in much the same way that Broadway differs from SoHo, or Beverly Hills is different from Venice Beach. Where one is full of bright lights, flashy people, and fast-paced action, the other is laid back in both style and substance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Woodholme by DeWayne Wickham. Copyright © 1995 DeWayne Wickham. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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