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As teenagers in Newport News, my mother had become friendly with James, and even fancied him a bit; but when Nelson Elmer came home he chased after her. His timing was great. She had just finished her sophomore year at Virginia Union University and, as much as she wanted to stay in college, her relationship with Viola and her father was deteriorating. Small and feisty, she was determined to make a place for herself in the world, with or without her father’s support.

  My father and mother started dating in August 1956. By December they were married, and living in a roomy Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone in Brooklyn with her aunt Alberta and uncle J.T. When she got pregnant in early 1957 they moved into a nicely maintained three-story rental building at 218 New York Avenue in Crown Heights, a block from a big Baptist church on a pretty, tree-lined street. I was born nine months after their marriage, in the fall of 1957, when my father was working at the post office via the GI bill, and my mother was a happy young housewife. Unfortunately, little Nelson Daryle (that’s me) missed all the good times and went on to become a statistic.

  From 1880 to 1960, United States government census figures tell us that approximately 30 percent of all black children under fourteen lived in homes with only one parent. The number for white American families during that same period was roughly 10 percent, so there is a long-standing difference in these patterns. But what’s most significant for me is the consistency in the number of single-parent black households. From Reconstruction through the long years of lynching, and in and out of two world wars, the patterns of single-parent black family life remained stable. The majority of these families were headed by black women, which eventually gave rise to the cliché of the “strong black woman.” But that number also means that 70 percent of all black families had both parents present. That was the world my great-grandparents and grandparents, despite whatever personal issues they had, held together in the face of racism, civil inequality, and plain old personal drama.

  It is the census figures released in 1960, however, that foreshadowed a grim future.

  The percentage of single parent black families in the 1960 census is 32.3, the highest then recorded. Later reports reveal the subsequent family disaster: In 1980, 53 percent, and in 1990, 63 percent of black children under fourteen were being raised by one parent. So my parents’ separation, while personally traumatic, was also part of a larger change in black behavior, one that would lead the generations after me to joke “my biological didn’t bother” about their absent fathers. When our family splintered in the early sixties, we didn’t know we were harbingers of the future, where the idea of black family would be in a state of constant flux and redefinition.

  HIGH FIDELITY

  I am in the living room of apartment 6C in the Samuel J. Tilden housing projects located in the once Jewish, soon to be black and Puerto Rican, ghetto of Brownsville, Brooklyn. It is 1960. I am four. I am slender, with big round cheeks and long, curly eyelashes that keep getting into my eyes. I stand on my tiptoes in my stocking feet. I wear pajama pants and a small white T-shirt. My small brown fingers clutch the edge of a Motorola high-fidelity stereo, which is made of shiny lacquered wood and has a lemony smell, from the polish my mother applies every Saturday afternoon.

  I feel the bass speakers in my stomach. I smell the polish. I feel the music. Looking over the edge, down into the bowels of the hi-fi, I watch the turntable needle roll across the grooves of a seven-inch record with a blue and white label at 45 revolutions per minute. The song is “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes. The song is on Motown Records, but I don’t know that yet. All I know is that the song is about the man who delivers the mail in a light blue uniform, who possesses an amazing set of jingling keys that opens the long row of metal mailboxes in the lobby.

  As much as I enjoy “Please Mr. Postman,” I’m anxious to hear the next record. Not just because it’s Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” (which is the first record I ever asked my mother to buy for me), but because above “Mr. Postman” on the turntable are a slew of seven-inch singles suspended around a fat brown cylinder. Once “Please Mr. Postman” finishes, the needle arm moves away, a single vinyl 45 plops down on the turntable, and the needle returns, catching the groove and sending the “doom-doom-doom-doom-doom” rhythm of “Oh, Pretty Woman” vibrating through my body.

  This Motorola stereo was the centerpiece of my family’s living room, and our social life. Ma didn’t allow my little sister, Andrea, or me in our living room too often, because she didn’t want us sitting on her plastic-covered sofa, playing with the rabbit-shaped ash tray, or fingering the dice-shaped cigarette lighter on her glass-and-wood living-room table. But if we were playing records in the early evenings or on weekends (or after school, when she wasn’t yet home from work), it was okay.

  All through my childhood, from my first consciousness of music into the early seventies, that Motorola was my passport, not simply to records, but to the vast nation outside New York that the music came from. While the black-and-red labels of Atlantic 45s carried a Broadway address, most of the records in her collection came from Memphis (the Stax Records label was pale blue, with a finger-snapping logo) or Detroit (Motown’s black and white label had a red star for the Motor City, while Tamla’s colors were yellow and brown). As I read the labels of the records Ma brought home, I slowly became familiar with the cities of soul—Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cincinnati. By the time I was an adolescent, I could identify certain names that recurred in the credits: Curtis Mayfield, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Steve Cropper. Way before I understood what these credits meant, or who these people were, I was already collecting info for the books and articles I had no idea I would eventually write.

  My interest in these records stemmed from a desire to better understand my mother’s life. My mother was a soul girl: petite and cute as hell, with a nice little figure, and a bright, girlish smile. Arizona Bacchus George, aka Doll, aka Ma, was full of life, and loved to laugh. Though burdened with raising two kids alone in a Brooklyn housing project, she didn’t allow herself to become a stranger to fun. Not only was her ever-growing stack of 45s a testament to her love of music and dance, but she regularly held parties in that sacrosanct living room for her girlfriends and their male admirers. Bacardi and Coke flowed. Gin was always available. Every now and then, one of her cooler friends smoked some reefer alongside legal cigarettes like Kools and Parliaments.

  My mother’s favorite singer was a raw-voiced Georgia boy named Otis Redding, who, I suspect, represented the kind of unbridled passion on record that she sought but found elusive in life. All her favorites were on the gritty, highly emotive side of soul—Aretha, Gladys Knight, Wilson Pickett, and David Ruffin, of the temptin’ Temptations (though she liked the smoother Al Green too).

  And I can’t forget the Godfather of Soul. I remember the time we took a pilgrimage to the Apollo Theater for a matinee show. It was a chilly, overcast day, and my mother and I joined a long line of black folk, as far as I could see, huddled on 125th Street, awaiting entry. Once inside, we sat in the orchestra near the back. I remember elements of the Brown Revue quite distinctly: Pigmeat Markham did his famous “Here Comes the Judge” routine; the Fabulous Flames danced like demons and harmonized like choir boys; the J.B.s, behind the antic introduction of MC Danny Ray, banged out a medley of the great man’s hits.

  Then Brown himself appeared, a short, dark man with shiny, processed hair who whirled and shuddered and shouted. On the way back to Brooklyn on the A train, I babbled to my mother about the sweaty man who kept tossing the cape off his back and running back to the mike to wail, “Please! Please! Please!”

  It was special for me, not because I’d seen James Brown, but because I was too young for so many of the shows my mother attended. Unlike today, when the separation between adult and kid entertainment has been blurred to the detriment of both, soul music was fundamentally music by, about, and for adults. When my ma put on her auburn wig to see Otis Redding at Brooklyn’s Brevoort Theater, or her blue eyeliner
to watch the Supremes at the Copacabana, it was to experience things so raw and so smooth, they weren’t right for a child to see.

  Still, I had access to the records and Ma’s parties. Like the proverbial fly on the wall, I’d sneak out of the back bedroom I shared with Andrea, and curl around corners to watch the adults do the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Mashed Potato, and the Boogaloo. I watched as my mother’s friends entered the land of a thousand dances and, every so often, I entered that territory too. To justify my presence at the perimeter of Ma’s events, I learned a few dances that never failed to amuse inebriated party people.

  Despite a career marred by mediocre records and piss-poor management, Jackie Wilson was a soul god whose onstage athleticism and daring rivaled James Brown. The ex-Golden Gloves boxer’s signature move was to go from standing up into a deep split, and then, his sharkskin suit spotted with sweat, slide back up again using his powerful leg muscles. I never saw him live, but watched him do this dance on several TV shows, and I was always impressed with how he seemed to defy gravity. For Wilson, this was as much a trademark as his vocal hiccup (a major influence on Michael Jackson) and his dance songs (many of them cowritten by a young Berry Gordy). I’d get in front of grown folks in my jammies and white socks, and do my version of Wilson’s split, drawing applause as well as extra Coca-Cola and potato chips.

  Soul music wasn’t the only kind of culture to which Ma exposed my sister and me. On Saturdays our little family of three would hop on the IRT elevated train at Rockaway Avenue and head west, sometimes to downtown Brooklyn, but usually to Times Square and Midtown Manhattan, for movies or a play. I remember seeing Mary Poppins at Radio City and singing the entire song book, from “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” to the delightful “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” all that summer. Mary Poppins may seem an odd obsession for a little black boy from Brooklyn, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Music can pull you out of the box of your location, circumstances, and the particulars of your life for as long as you sing along. As a child, all this music suggested a universe I didn’t expect to travel to but could still visit with my ears.

  In a side section of that Motorla hi-fi was a space reserved for LPs. In those days my mother didn’t buy many of those. LPs were expensive, and often contained more filler than soul food. Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man was there. So was Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music. There were a few jazz albums in that slot as well. They stuck out because they weren’t purchased by my mother, but by her soon-to-be ex-husband, my often absent father, Nelson Elmer George.

  His taste in records very much reflected his world view. Whereas my mother listened to joyous sermons of secular salvation, my father’s records were sad, seductive selections from jazzmen, like trumpeter Chet Baker and saxophonist Gene Ammons, soloists who spent their off-the-bandstand lives in thrall to drugs and, perhaps, to the romantic notion of the junkie as artist. This was music of a nocturnal nature for folks “too hip” to participate in the finger popping of soul.

  My father saw himself as one of those people. With a GI bill job in the post office lined up, Nelson Elmer could have joined the growing black middle class and guided his little family into a stable nine-to-five lifestyle that would have eventually placed us in a two-story house in Queens or Long Island. Instead my father got addicted. New York City was his narcotic and it made him high, happy, and irresponsible. Bars and barmaids, thin socks and straw hats, numbers spots and craps games were all more attractive to him than diapers and dishwater. In the fall of 1960 I was three, and my mother was pregnant with my sister, and Nelson Elmer was already living out his big city desires, as evidenced by the women’s perfume on his shirts and the bags under his eyes.

  The Tilden projects are at the far end of Brooklyn, while Nelson Elmer’s exciting new life was lived up across 110th Street in Manhattan, on the wide boulevards of Harlem. There he knew Gene Ammons, tried to act as cool as Chet Baker, and remade himself into an uptown cool cat, the kind of man he’d probably wanted to be since boyhood in Newport News. Of course, it took me a long time to learn all this. All I knew was that my father wasn’t there, that he liked music without words, and that he had moved to a faraway place called Harlem, which to my little ears sounded like “Holland.” Being an early reader, and a careful observer of both Saturday morning cartoons and Dutch Boy paint commercials, I knew Holland as a land of windmills and wooden shoes.

  One of my most vivid childhood memories of my father involves the film noir life he’d created for himself uptown. He picked me up from the projects in a long, powder-blue Cadillac with pointy tail-light fins and bright whitewall tires. He wore a jaunty straw hat with a black-and-red band and a matching red-and-black knit sweater. He was a short, yellow, bantam rooster of a man who had a wonderfully phony-sounding laugh that amused him greatly. I always felt he made lots of jokes just so he could luxuriate in his own chuckle. He told me we were on our way to Harlem. When I wondered aloud if we’d see windmills, my comment so tickled him that he repeated it to everyone we’d meet that day. We drove uptown via Riverside Drive, as I craned my neck to get fleeting glimpses of fabled buildings and nameless skyscrapers.

  I was still looking for windmills while my father maneuvered into a parking space way east, somewhere in Spanish Harlem. We took the elevator up in a well-maintained apartment building to the residence of a fleshy, fair-skinned woman in a black wig who referred to Nelson Elmer as “Pete Smith.” My memory fails me as to whether I’d been prepped for this stunner or not, but either way it was still weird. Most people I knew either called him George, his last name, or Elmer, his middle name. My mother called him Nelson. Pete Smith? This must have been his alter ego, the guy who’d emerged from his cocoon in Harlem.

  Why Nelson Elmer George revealed his “other self ” to me, and exposed me to a woman I assume was his lover, remains a mystery. Perhaps he was sending a veiled message to my mother. When I got home and related the tale of Pete Smith to Ma, she just laughed and went back to watching television.

  After leaving the woman’s home, we stopped at a Harlem bar filled with bright neon beer signs, well-dressed patrons, and the stale, sweetly stinky aroma of spilled drinks, Old Spice cologne, and menthol cigarettes. Bluesy jazz, like the Jazz Messengers and Jimmy Smith, flowed from a fat, centrally located jukebox. My father propped me on a bar stool and introduced me to the barmaid, whose name was either Mabel or Thelma or Peaches, or one of those old Negro names that colored people loved and that African Americans have wiped from the phone book.

  As she distracted me with a Coca-Cola float (crushed ice, Coca-Cola, and vanilla ice cream, topped with a cherry), my father slipped into a backroom to “do a little business.” I presume this was Pete Smith talking. I felt like I sat on that bar stool for an eternity. I watched beefy women slowly roll their hips as they danced with men in snap-brim caps. I watched a machine spew out Kool and Newport cigarettes, and marveled as the multicolored bottles disposed of their contents through metal nipples that regulated the flow of liquor into short, round glasses. In other words, I sat on that bar stool long enough to know I didn’t belong in that bar. When “Pete Smith” returned to retrieve his “little man,” I was more than ready to head back to Brooklyn, soul music, and my place in front of Ma’s Motorola hi-fi. What I couldn’t know then was that much of my adult life would be spent in moody, music-filled rooms just like that bar in Harlem.

  THE VILLE

  The motto of Brownsville, Brooklyn, when I was growing up there was “I’m from the ’Ville. I never ran and never will.” A cool sentiment but far from the reality of my life there. My father ran, and, in doing so, profoundly affected the trajectory of my life. Since boyhood my dealings with my father have been sporadic, short-lived, and not intimate in the ways that matter most. When I was younger that was his fault; as an adult, it’s been mine. That we share the same name save the middle one is obviously not our only similarity. When confronted with the unpleasant, emot
ionally challenging work of (re)building a father-son relationship, I’ve opted for avoidance over conversation, absence over entanglement.

  My mother calls my father “a jack of all trades and a master of none.” In his life Nelson Elmer George has been (as far as I know) a postman, a merchant seaman, a short-order cook, a bartender, a taxi driver, a security guard, a process server, and a low-level cocaine dealer. In Nelson Elmer’s DNA there’s a hustler gene that’s been passed on to me. I’ve had a true nine-to-five job only once in my life and that was only from January 1981 to the spring of ’82. In that brief sojourn into the workaday world, I detested the moments in my hole-in-the-wall office, all the while knowing that the world was revolving without me out walking around in it. I’ve always felt more comfortable as a freelancer, dependent on my wits, smarts, and eyes for opportunities. I may never have been Pete Smith, but I must admit, I understand the impulse.

  I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t discovered writing and let it obsess me. I imagine that as a semiskilled, big-city African American male in the latter part of the twentieth century, my life wouldn’t have been much different from that of my father. I’d have floated from thing to thing in search of satisfaction, subject to a wanderlust that would have never quite been quenched. Without a marketable skill, I would have scrambled for small checks, and lived off-the-books for decades.

  Writing saved me from that naked economic uncertainty. However, it’s never made me rich: it’s always just gotten me by. For every year of six-figure success I’ve enjoyed, there have been long periods when I’ve felt about to be tugged back down into the relative poverty of my childhood. Because I’ve lived most of my life in Brooklyn, I often find myself on many of the streets where I grew up. Looking around it now makes me all the more aware that my family lived just a few notches above real economic peril.