Reginald Major and I as we often were during these “interviews”
My father lived on 117th near Lennox, now Malcolm X Boulevard. Many of his stories were about that neighborhood which holds so much romance in the American, especially Black American, historical memory.
Let’s talk about Harlem. What was it like on your block, in your corner of the ‘hood?
The block that we grew up in was a mixed block. The only thing that just about everybody on the block had in common was that they were immigrants. Again an interesting thing. They were immigrants but I never had an internal sense of being a first generation of American. They’d always put this stuff on me, even though I knew where my folks were from, I was a child of (Southern) slavery.
You mean you must have come from the South because that was where all black folks were from?
Harlem of 1930’s
Yeah. But not on our block. There were very few Blacks from the south. (Most came from the West Indies. Ed. Note) We’d play together, mostly Jewish kids, a few Puerto Rican kids but Jewish and Black. From the Puerto Rican kids we get a little Spanish from but the Jewish kids, the momma would call Johnny in Yiddish and we’d be “What’d she say?” “Oh nothing man” so we consistently asked and the Jewish kids wouldn’t say anything. We, the Jewish and the Black kids, agreed that Yiddish was incomprehensible. It relieved the Jewish kids because they were brought up not to let us know. They had their own language where they could talk to themselves. We got along comfortably in the streets.
We had a class with a woman, her name was Miss Cressera. We had to memorize “Charge of the Light Brigade” by Tennyson. There was this little refrain “…Into the jaws of Death
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.”
But in-between was narrative and so there was this kid, I think his name was Sammy, but he hadn’t memorized his stuff. I was just before him and I had memorized my part. I did that and sat down. And Sammy is mumbling and just before he gets to “Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them…”
Miss Cressera stops him and says, “What language are you speaking?” and I said, “Yiddish.” (laughter) And she went off. She was Jewish and she ended up saying how Yiddish was a beautiful language and its “better than that language you niggers speak.”
The thing is we played with Jewish kids. Tough Jewish kids, the ones who fought. But the other Jewish kids, the ones who were a little terrorized, their mothers didn’t want to hear this stuff from the teacher. The teacher was admonished. It was a rare case of multicultural cooperation.