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It was time to get caught. We were going too far, taking too many chances, getting in way too deep.
For me, growing up across from the factories in the early 1960s was an odyssey. The Carborundumized gritty streets of the East Side of Niagara Falls offered me opportunities to discover what lay beyond the choking acid-air borders of my Dupont, Olin Matheson, Hooker Chemical neighborhood.
What I saw those nights when my cousin Billie and I roamed like curious ferrets in search of truth, justice, and the American Way, did not jibe with what the good nuns and priests were laying down during the daylight hours. The contradictions drove me for the rest of my life to challenge people to do what they said they knew was right. I discovered that people often don't mean what they say or say what they mean. A lot of religious people and politicians seemed to be truly afflicted with this curious malady.
Crossing 24th Street, venturing out to the bright lights of Falls Street, I learned firsthand that all that glitters ain't necessarily gold. From the goody-goody family tourist Mecca by day, the city changed like a werewolf at full moon into something dark and lurid where hometown folk mingled with travelers as if there were no tomorrow, no consequences for deeds done in the neon and dim light of the silvery moon.
Because they were black bars -- Murphy's and the SunSet on what used to be known as Erie Avenue, a commercial strip lined with businesses operated and supported by the once-crowded, thriving black community that stretched from Niagara Street, Portage Road, East Falls Street, to Erie Avenue -- we did not stand out as much as we did when we went into the white taverns and clubs in other neighborhoods. We had begun to understand that there were invisible borders, some too dangerous to cross without risking our lives. After all, we were just trying to have some fun. We were not on a crusade to integrate the city of Niagara Falls.
Those battles in the South to integrate the schools, restaurants and public accommodations seemed foreign to me. I felt bad for the people in the South whom I saw on the nightly news being beaten with night sticks by the police and hosed down by mean firemen, jeered, taunted and beaten by rioting mobs of enraged white people we called "crackers" and who seemed to genuinely hate black folks just because they were black. "Thank goodness we don't live there," I thought. How good it is to be free, in the North where black folks can come and go as we please without fear of being beaten to death by the police or lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. There were no signs over our Niagara Falls water fountains that required white kids to use one and blacks to use another. Our schools did not seem to be segregated. On the surface, blacks and whites seemed to be getting along just fine. That was on the surface. Scratched just a little, I found different kinds of signs that kept my people down and out of the mainstream, out of the good jobs, away from the better neighborhoods.
Living in Niagara Falls, a northern terminus on the Underground Railroad, where people fled the tyranny of slavery and the cruelty of racism of the South, was a blessing I came to appreciate early in my life. Mom made sure that we were aware of our history, our roots. Her family was part Native American and she made sure that we knew and appreciated that part of our heritage. We were taught to respect Mother Earth and to accept people and their differences as they are, not to try to force our views on anyone. Though I loved wearing my cowboy boots and cowboy clothes, I also enjoyed playing the role of the "Indians" and I rooted for them in the movies, wishing that for once they would win one of those battles.
Dad made sure we knew our Southern roots too, taking us to Florida every year, where his family lived in completely black communities replete with black-owned stores, gas stations, restaurants, bars, barbershops, everything. There it was clearly understood. You stayed inside your own community and never ventured outside of it to do business or in any way mix with white folks. Black people who worked outside of their own neighborhoods in "white town" had to carry identification cards giving them permission to be in the white communities where they worked as maids and general laborers. But white people did not have to carry identification when they ventured into the black communities for any reason.
Still a young boy, barely into my teens, I was quickly discovering the world and finding that it was brimming with contradictions.
Florida was, and to a large extent still is, absolutely segregated, complete with all-black schools, hospitals, universities, everything. I was amazed, because there were not as many black-owned businesses in Niagara Falls, although there were more in the '50s and '60s than there are now.
I did not fully understand why, if they had their own businesses, they were fighting to have the right to patronize the white-owned restaurants. What was so special about eating and going to the bathroom with white folks? Living where I did in Niagara Falls, I did it all the time and I really never thought of it as being a big deal. It did not make me feel special in any way to pee next to white boys. It seemed to me that pee was pee.
Like millions of kids around the country, we were smitten by the music of the day. World events were also starting to impact life as we knew it. We had no idea how much they would change us.
Starting around 1962, the year Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for trying to organize a general strike in South Africa, and President Kennedy decided to blockade Cuba, I began to look more closely at what was happening around the planet and how it was affecting me.
Dad was more careful than ever when we traveled south that year. He would not let us kids use the public restrooms and we didn't stop to eat in restaurants that year or ever again. Instead, Mom fried up lots of chicken and we ate in the car on the way. The side of the road served as our bathroom and wet washcloths kept us clean until we were safe at Dad's sister's house in Riviera Beach, Fla.
Things were starting to heat up in the South when Martin Luther King was arrested and stayed in jail for a whole month, the year I learned how to dance to Little Eva's "Locomotion" and to "Twist" like Chubby Checker.
On a quest to discover as much as we could about life after dark, Billie and I continued to take crazy risks, sneaking out of our homes and traipsing into the night to fill our heads with as much information as possible before dawn.
By 1964 -- the year Martin Luther King was jailed in Florida, Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship and three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi -- Billie, our cousin Chris and buddy Anthony McCrea and I had formed a garage band we called The Royal DeVoes. With guitars, drums and amplifiers financed through our part-time jobs and healthy contributions from our parents, we were rehearsing almost daily, desperately trying to sound like Booker T and the MGs and the Temptations while our sisters -- Jessie, Linda, Nonnie, Joanne and Doris -- dressed and sang with us in big wigs, stepping in time like Martha and the Vandellas.
With practice, we got good enough to compete in local talent shows and to appear regularly at Miss Cavers' Dinette on East Falls Street. One of the nicest women in Niagara Falls, Miss Cavers operated the quaint dinette for the local kids living in the surrounding all-black neighborhood. It was a clean, safe place, where we could sit and have ice cream and sodas while we listened to music and sometimes even danced. She was kind enough to let our band play there, giving us exposure and that highly sought-after commodity that every musician craves yet few deserve -- an audience.
With our newly found fame, and a gaggle of girl groupies, Billie and I were in seventh heaven. We were singing and dancing our way to the top.
After a Saturday afternoon gig at Cavers, we decided we were going to sneak back out that night to hook up with some of the cuties we had met earlier in the day. "Just one more time," we thought, "What the heck, they'll never catch us."
I made my way out the window after I reminded my sister Jessie that I would tap on the window as usual for her to let me in when I got back. Billie and I scoured the night in search of the young honeys we met earlier, but they, being good church-going girls, were not allowed out that late at night and I never met one daring enough to sneak out. They were at home, snug in their beds. Tired of roaming, we decided to call it a night, even though it was barely one o'clock in the morning and we had not even scored a slow dance let alone an opportunity to show off our much-practiced, highly-polished James Brown moves. We headed home.
Quietly closing the chain-link gate behind me, I tiptoed around to the backyard and made my way up the side of the garage to the roof and the window at the end of the hallway next to Jessie's room on the second floor. Crouched over, I tapped lightly on the window and waited for Jessie's usual grumbling as she pulled back on the two spring-loaded latches on either side of the new aluminum storm windows to let me back in. I tapped and I waited. Nothing. Tapped, waited, whispered, "Jessieeeeee..." Nothing.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was bathed in flooding white light while a mechanical voice coming from a police car that had pulled up into the alley next to the house directed me, "Stand up and put your hands over your head." Then the inside light came on and looking at me with a cold, grim face was Mom, her lips pressed together so tightly they formed a perfectly straight thin line that said clearly, "I am going to KILL YOU!"
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | February 12 2002 |