City Kid Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  HOW I CAME TO BE

  HIGH FIDELITY

  THE VILLE

  MY HERO

  A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE

  PEER PRESSURE

  A THEATER ON PITKIN AVENUE

  SOUL SONGS

  HANGING WITH CAPTAIN AMERICA

  BK ’69

  AFRODISIACS

  JOINING THE LITERARY GUILD

  BK EARLY SEVENTIES

  TILDEN TOPICS

  NYC LATE SEVENTIES

  THE WHITE LINES THAT BIND

  NYC EARLY EIGHTIES

  KINGS FROM QUEENS

  BLACK HOLLYWOOD

  FROM MOTOROLA TO MOTOWN

  FORT GREENE DREAMS

  TALKING HEAD

  VOICES INSIDE MY HEAD

  EAST NEW YORK

  SPIKE

  JOKES AND SMOKE

  LIFE SUPPORT

  FAMILY REUNION

  ALSO BY NELSON GEORGE

  NONFICTION

  Post-Soul Nation

  Hip Hop America

  Buppies, B-boys, Baps, & Bohos

  Blackface

  Elevating the Game

  The Death of Rhythm & Blues

  Where Did Our Love Go?

  WITH RUSSELL SIMMONS

  Life and Def

  FICTION

  The Accidental Hunter

  Night Work

  Show & Tell

  One Woman Short

  Seduced

  Urban Romance

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Nelson George, 2009

  All rights reserved

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  Insert page 7 (top): Photo Chuck Pulin

  Insert page 10: © Chase Roe

  Insert page 12 (top): © David Lee 2008

  Insert page 13 (bottom): © suekwon

  Other insert photographs courtesy of Nelson George

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  George, Nelson.

  City kid : a writer’s memoir of ghetto life and post-soul success / by Nelson George.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-02240-5

  1. George, Nelson. 2. Music critics—United States—Biography. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  ML423.G317A3 2009

  781.64092—dc22

  [B] 2008027422

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  DEDICATED TO MY FAMILY, FOR THE LOVE AND THE LESSONS

  Between 1950 and 1957 alone, Brooklyn lost a total of 135,000 men,

  women, and children. They were buying the blarney about the suburbs,

  they were buying cars, they were moving out to the sticks.

  Filling the housing vacuum they left behind, 100,000 newcomers

  moved in, many of them black and Puerto Rican, many also seeking

  a better tomorrow, as their predecessors had. Another wave of

  resettlement for Brooklyn.

  —Elliot Willenski, When Brooklyn Was the World: 1920-1957

  INTRODUCTION

  This book is called City Kid because, well, quite honestly I couldn’t survive in the suburbs or the country. I don’t drive. Malls give me hives, and I’ve never dined in a Denny’s and don’t wanna start now. This book contains few descriptions of rolling hills, limpid pools of water, or clear blue skies. There is, however, much talk of playground games, nightclubs, and boundless ambition.

  Almost the entire book takes place in four of New York’s boroughs, with the exception of a chapter in Detroit, two in Los Angeles, and two in the Tidewater area of Virginia. I could have slipped in chapters set in my other favorite cities (London, Paris, Amsterdam), but this book is about how family and art intersect, and the most important connecting points for me are the concrete jungles of America.

  Peace.

  HOW I CAME TO BE

  Like most black Americans, I have only a fleeting understanding of my family’s history. I know nothing of my African ancestors, but, thanks to the diligence of a few relatives, I do know a few things about my American ones. My two family trees were rooted in Virginia and North Carolina during the Civil War era. At some point during the early 1860s, in the small town of Bracey, Virginia, just north of North Carolina, Willie Butcher, a black man, met a white woman named Pinkey George. Miscegenation was much more common in this country, and in the South in particular, than our official histories let on. Yet a real romantic relationship between a black man and a white woman in that part of the country at that time makes me think Willie and Pinkey were crazy in love.

  This union produced one son, Thomas George, born in 1862. Thomas, who married Harriet Boyd, born June 1, 1864, toiled on the Boyd plantation. Harriet’s father, a houseboy on that same plantation, was named Nelson Boyd, and Harriet gave his name to one of their six children, my grandfather Nelson Sterling George.

  Nelson Sterling, born January 15, 1892, was a short, fair-skinned man with sharp, piercing eyes, curly hair, and facial features that suggested that Willie Butcher had some Native American blood coursing through his veins. In photographs Nelson Sterling is always very well dressed in nicely tailored suits that were often augmented by a straw hat. Older members of the George family recall that he was quite a storyteller, and that on some Sunday evenings down in Bracey he’d gather up the children and tell ghost stories. My mother says he was a very graceful, handsome man who grayed early, which only enhanced his looks.

  My own memories of Nelson Sterling are fleeting. He died in October 1960, when I was just three years old. I remember a gray-haired man in a suit picking me up and holding me up in the air on a trip to Virginia. It must have been in September of that year, since the family held a birthday party in Grandpa’s backyard. I was the first George grandchild, and I was named after him, which must have been a great source of pride. My grandmother, Matdora, aka Mattie Clary, was nearly a foot taller than her husband, and about fifteen years younger, and she had a stern demeanor that was refle
cted in her omnipresent frown. Matdora would outlive her husband by some thirty-six years, and would be a strong, though not always warm, presence in my life.

  What I do know of Nelson Sterling and Matdora’s life was that the early years were rough. They lived in a little two-room shack down in Bracey, and, as their family expanded to seven kids, some of them would be sent off for a time to live with other relatives, to ease the financial burden. Later most of their offspring ended up relocating to New York and Chicago. In the 1950s, Nelson Sterling and Matdora relocated to Newport News, Virginia, where a massive shipbuilding and dry-dock company, and the naval base it supported, became an employment hub. The Newport News shipyard, which for decades was the world’s largest, was built by Collis P. Huntington, who’d been the driving force behind the first transcontinental railroad. About his Virginia operation Huntington once said, “We shall build good ships here. At a profit—if we can. At a loss—if we must. But always good ships.” From World War II through the Korean War, the shipyard boomed, creating hundreds of jobs that, despite the limitations of Southern Jim Crow laws, ended up feeding scores of black families. Because of the shipyard Newport News became a place where a man of African descent could earn an honest wage, buy a house, and have some self-respect. In the cradle of the Confederacy, Newport News was something of a safe haven for black aspirations.

  The Georges moved into a big, three-bedroom home, with a piano she loved to play and a big garden where she grew fruit for preserves and gathered the vegetables for her massive Sunday feasts. But all was not smooth in the household of Nelson Sterling and Mattie. He had a child—a girl—outside the marriage, and not with just any woman, but with one of his wife’s sisters. While her children eventually came to accept this unexpected sibling, my grandmother was, not surprisingly, reluctant to do so.

  When my mother started dating Nelson Elmer, his father, a World War I veteran, was spending most of the week living at a Veterans Administration hospital, where he’d receive treatment for his diabetes, and then come home on the weekends. It seemed an unusual arrangement, and strikes me even more so now (perhaps fallout from his out-of-wedlock “marriage”?).

  My father, Nelson Elmer, was in the middle of Matdora’s pack and, like his daddy, was on the short side, and had a gift for gab and a persuasive charm. He and his older brother, James, both served in Korea. When Nelson Elmer came back from Korea in the mid-1950s, he began wooing a cutie who didn’t live too far away from the George residence. The girl’s nickname was Doll.

  Arizona Bacchus’s family saga goes back to a North Carolina clan known as Brothers. As far as family historians know, there were nine Brothers children, but only one was a boy—Willie—who kept the name alive, as all the girls took on the names of their husbands. My great-grandmother was named Celia Bacchus, which I’ve been told was the name of a plantation owner of Greek heritage in North Carolina, but that may just be speculation. Celia had three sons, one of whom, Daniel Bacchus, was my grandfather. Daniel was dark, stocky, and muscular, and, when he was young, had long, thick hair that suggested his family had Native American blood as well. In 1929, at age twenty-nine, my great-grandmother Celia moved with her boys to Newport News. I don’t know if she was married or not, but I’m assuming not, as no man’s name has surfaced.

  The Newport News shipyards were a magnet for working men from around the South, and provided decades of employment for the Bacchus side. Daniel worked there; so would Daniel Junior, later called Son; so would one of Daniel’s son-in-laws, and several of his grandchildren. Appropriately, Daniel met my grandmother, Berneda Wilkins, who had also been raised in North Carolina, while working in the Newport News shipyards.

  His steady income as a chipper at the Newport News shipyard enabled Daniel to buy a house in a nice Negro neighborhood and raise a family of five. The last of those children was a tiny little girl who was almost named Alabama, after an aunt, but instead ended up with the distinctive name “Arizona.” In truth, she was so small that when her brother Rudolph first saw her, he exclaimed, “baby doll,” and the “Doll” part stuck. At the time Arizona “Doll” Bacchus was born, her oldest sister, Cecelia, was already married, had had children, and was living in a Southern version of public housing known as Newsome Park.

  Doll would become all too familiar with Newsome Park after two life-altering tragedies that occurred when she was seven years old. In the summer of 1943 her oldest brother, Son, was riding his bike with little brother Rudolph on the handlebars, and Doll balancing sideways on the bike. When Rudolph tipped forward at a stop, all three Bacchus kids fell to the ground. Somehow a spoke on the front wheel got jammed into the inner thigh of Doll’s right leg, digging deep, and scarring her down to the knee. Due to the poor treatment she received at the local hospital, this childhood injury would trouble my mother the rest of her life.

  That was bad, but that winter things became terrible. On the night of January 19, 1944, the family celebrated Berneda Bacchus’s forty-eighth birthday. My mother remembers it as a fun evening, with all of her family enjoying ice cream and cake in the living room. The next morning she was awakened by the sound of screaming. It was a familiar voice. Her mother was yelling, “Help! I’m on fire!” Smoke poured into her bedroom. In the hallway she, three of her siblings (Son, Frances, and Rudolph), and a boarder, Mary McQueen, found the staircase blocked by smoke and fire. Son jumped out of the second-floor window and then stood on the ground as Rudolph and the women jumped down into his arms. Once on the ground, they turned and witnessed a frightening sight—the charred body of Berneda Bacchus.

  The headline in the local newspaper read, “Kerosene Blast Fatal to Woman.” The lead paragraph said, “Berneda Bacchus, 48, Negro, wife of Daniel Bacchus of 714 19th Street, was burned to death this morning by the explosion of kerosene she was pouring into her kitchen stove.” Firemen had received the alarm at 8:14 A.M. and “found the victim where she had fallen between the porch and the gate. She was dead, but her body was still burning. Dr. Louis Loeb, city physician, said it was the worst case of that type he had ever seen.” The firemen found a five-gallon kerosene can with its bottom blasted out. The large can was apparently filled with gas fumes, which ignited when held over the stove. According to the fire department, this type of accident was very typical in the days of kerosene and cast-iron stoves. My mother remembers standing with her brothers and sisters next to my grandmother as she took her last breaths. Ma says she looked up and counted out “One, two, three, four,” gazed at her four youngest offspring, and then closed her eyes forever.

  My mother went to live in Newsome Park with her oldest sister, Cecelia, her husband, Eugene, aka Cootie, and their three kids—Jackie, Teddy, and Gertrude. She was technically their aunt, but they were all around the same age and grew up more like brothers and sisters.

  Cecelia’s husband, Cootie, worked at the shipyard, and was, when he was sober, a quiet, hardworking man. But drink put the devil in him, making him bad tempered and abusive toward Cecelia. Despite years of physical harm, she wouldn’t let her sons intervene. Ma watched this relationship for years, and though she revered Ceceila and viewed her as a second mother, vowed never to allow herself to be treated that way by a man.

  At twelve my mother moved in with her father and his second wife, Viola. The tale of their courtship is told often, and with no affection, by the Bacchus clan. Apparently Viola had been after my grandfather even before Berneda’s death, and wooed him immediately afterward. My grandfather was a dapper man and a hard worker who owned his own home—a good catch. Still, it was a shock when he married her just six months after Grandma’s burial. It happened so fast that everyone claimed Miss Viola had “worked the roots” on Daniel Bacchus (aka, used witchcraft to win his heart). The tale that’s come down to me, from both my mother and her siblings, is that she was a two-faced woman who showed one side to her new husband and another to his kids.

  My mother and uncle Rudolph, both of whom lived at home as teenagers, talk about Miss Viola lock
ing away food when Daniel wasn’t home, and denying them meals unless he was present. My mother, who continued to suffer greatly from her injured leg, says she would tell the adolescent girl, “You’re gonna be a cripple. You’ll never walk right again.” She’d also make fun of Berneda, taunting my mother by saying, “Your mother wasn’t nothing, and you’ll be nothing, too.”

  This psychological abuse wouldn’t have amounted to anything if it wasn’t for Daniel’s attitude. In the many arguments that ensued between his children and his new wife, my grandfather always sided with Viola. My mother suspects that he may have confronted her behind closed doors, but that was no comfort then, when she felt abandoned by her father.

  Left without her mother, and with an unresponsive father and busy older siblings, she created imaginary friends. Ella and Joe Bella kept her company, and provided entertaining companionship. Despite her leg problems, she was a bright student, well liked by her classmates, and had an adorable smile and a big infectious laugh.

  Nelson Elmer and James came back from overseas duty in 1956. James loved the discipline of the army life, and saw opportunities in it that didn’t yet exist for black men in most other American institutions. So James became a career soldier, staying in the armed forces until he retired as a colonel in the 1980s. His brother Nelson, in contrast, would rise to the rank of sergeant before mustering out and seeking his fortune in civilian life; he was given the nickname Little Nip, because his yellow complexion reminded other soldiers of their Korean adversaries, whom they routinely ridiculed by calling them “Nips” (a racial insult held over from World War II).