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Do you remember when you left home? Remember your last night there? I remember.
My legs had grown beyond the length of the narrow, brown, steel-framed bed that graced my room, a combination comic-book library, science lab and shrine to myself, complete with old book reports, baseball cards, pictures I took with my Brownie camera and maps of the world.
By then my feet were farther away from my head than ever, something I often took notice of over the years as a kid growing up in Niagara Falls in the 1950s and '60s. They were still smooth then, not wrinkled, not worn.
I think I remember lying in my crib as an infant with one of my big toes in my mouth. Babies can do that. Remember? Then as time went on, it became more and more difficult to do. My feet were getting too far away.
Some days during my early years, I enjoyed lying motionless upstairs in my room, listening to my family and to the steady grinding, pounding contortions of the factories across the street. Just thinking, letting my mind roam free wherever it wanted to go, imagining what it must be like someplace else in the world at that very moment.
On clear nights, I could sometimes see the moon from my bedroom window. Looking up at it, I wondered who might be somewhere else at that very moment, looking at that same moon. I wondered if we could sense each other's presence, communicate over thousands of miles by bouncing our thoughts off the surface of the moon. It still amazes me today to know that the same sun and moon that shine in Africa shine on me too, that the sky and all its wonders belong to no one and to everyone at the same time.
Real silence, in a house with eight kids and innumerable neighbors and cousins coming and going at every waking hour, was a spectacularly rare event. With my sisters constantly squabbling, Mom issuing orders and death threats, washing machines off balance, at least two televisions on different channels, Dad's Cleveland Indians baseball games and his constant sawing and hammering, piano practice, barking dogs and meowing cats, I learned to appreciate the quiet.
The periodic sounds of encroaching freight trains were the only things loud enough to drown them out. Their distant wail was a welcome relief, a signal that someone or something was arriving in town from someplace else. Usually it was raw material -- chemicals and minerals -- not smiling, happy tourists on their way to frolic at the parks at Niagara Falls.
They were bringing food for the always-hungry factories that had enslaved our fathers, forcing them to feed them, clean them, fix them, every day, every night, without end, banging and screeching their orders, blowing their loud whistles and horns, bellowing out from the depths of the earth into the dark, gray, smoke-covered clouds, spitting out their poisonous venom, killing us all slowly with their sad songs.
Sometimes on hot afternoons, I'd go down by the tracks and watch the trains come in and leave. The thrill of seeing an engineer wave from the big powerful locomotive engine car, and sometimes blast his horn, was an experience that made me feel connected to people who were traveling to and from places I could only dream of.
Years ago, when the passenger trains would pull into Niagara Falls, I would stand by the tracks near Falls Street to see their tiny heads, like construction-paper silhouettes against the little windows as they whirled by, but they seldom waved back. That was something between me and the engineers and the guys in the big red cabooses, the last car on the long trains heading away from town, taking their clicker-clatter train sounds with them.
My battery-powered transistor radio had the only real power to take me away. I lay there, sometimes all night long, traveling with the radio waves through the constant crackle-pop of the static, far away from Mackenna Avenue, all the way to Texas some nights when the weather patterns lined up just right, so that the sounds of a Dallas radio station poured directly into my head from beneath the pillow where my transistor radio was my one-way ticket out of town.
My fingers carefully adjusted the tuning dial, turning it one silly millimeter at a time from one direction to another, taking me to places and names I soon began to know like distant friends. WLS in Chicago and WINS in New York taught me more about geography, sociology and politics than I could possibly have learned anywhere else at the time.
The last thing I wanted to hear was the music. I wanted to listen to the news and talk shows, to hear what they were talking about someplace else, things that I rarely heard anyone in Niagara Falls talk about. There was something huge happening out there. The Civil Rights Movement was sweeping the nation. People were protesting in the streets. People were dying. Soon the desire to leave Niagara Falls was almost more than I could bear. My commitment to leave drove me to behaviors my parents and teachers and friends did not understand or appreciate. There was a huge movement sweeping the country and I wanted to be part of it. The revolution of the '60s was passing Niagara Falls by and I was running out of time.
Soon my self-destructive behavior, sneaking out of the house and roaming the streets all night, my performance at Bishop Duffy High School, where I was one of only three black students in an environment that seemed destined to suffocate me, all added up to one easy decision for my parents. Send him to Texas.
Of course, everybody put the best face possible on the decision. I was going to live in Texas with my Great-Uncle Lonnie and Aunt Maudie Bradberry. They were getting old, were childless and needed someone there to help out on their ranch.
The whole thing began to take on its own momentum. A departure date was set for mid-August, so that I would arrive in time to register for school. I was going to be enrolling in a public school, one with girls, live girls. I was already packed by the Fourth of July, saying goodbye to my lifelong friends, taking pictures of everything and everyone I could get to stand still long enough for me to focus my Brownie and snap what would turn out to be, in some cases, the last images of people I would never see again in my life. Some were headed for Vietnam and they would not be back, ever.
Any night before a big event is restless for most people, but I slept like a log my last night at home. The next morning, before my sisters woke up, I loaded my bags into the station wagon. In complete silence, Mom and Dad drove me to the bus station in Buffalo. Mom handed me $10 and hugged me goodbye. Dad shook my hand and walked away. I boarded the bus, and as it pulled out of the station, I smiled at the reflection on the smudged window of a young man with places to go and things to do.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 9 2002 |