Back to the dog days of a New York summer
Ancient memories (Final Installment)
By Saul Landau
Before we had gone fifty miles, the young Negro trucker, dressed in work pants, a work shirt and wearing a brimmed cloth cap, swapped 100 jokes with us. He came from Detroit, but had us figured as New Yorkers.
“You boys is Jewish from New York, right? I met some New York boys, speak like you do, some black, some white, some Porto Rican. I got along good with them. You know what though? We all agreed Korea was the shits, man.” The cab of the truck filled with silence even though the radio beat out Little Esther singing “If I don’t thrill you baby, goodness knows how hard I try.” (“Double Crossing Blues”)
“I’m lucky to get my black ass out of there in one piece. I seen a lotta men get killed and hurt real bad, know what I mean?” He had joined the army before Truman ordered U.S. troops to Korea and gotten his discharge in April 1951. “I like to have company when I drive, you know what I mean?” He smiled. “You boys don’t look too dangerous, you know even in them fancy cowboy hats.”
We took the rebuff about our treasured sombreros without comment and asked him about his experience in combat. Instead of talking about the battles he fought in, he just mentioned names of places where he had been. “Worst thing was this winter, you know. The wind was blowing from the north and it find every crack you got in your body and make itself to home there. Yeah, Korea, that was the shits.”
“How come you got out?” Harvey asked.
He laughed. “You ain’t gonna believe this,” he said, “but I fell out of my bunk one night and broke my shoulder and they sent me home.” He pointed to his right shoulder.
“So did they, you know, discriminate in the army like against colored people?” Harvey asked.
He laughed. “Man, they discriminate on the moon and the stars. That’s the way it is. But you know it’s better than it was before the army made it not legal. Shit, in five months, I went from buck private, to private first class and all the way to Corporal. They had colored Lieutenants and Captains and maybe even higher than that.” (Three years later, in 1954, the Supreme Court declared public school segregation illegal. In 1956, at dinner at another uncle’s house in Long Island — who made a million dollars as an accountant, but was also a member of the Communist Party — I heard another lecture on the critical importance of the Negro question as his wife rang the little table bell and a Negro maid came in to bus the dishes.)
Uncle Max never had much money, but he could deliver a speech. One resonated extra loud about how Truman had forced the armed forces to accept Negro soldiers because “American imperialism needed more cannon fodder and he had to make that concession.” I didn’t know how to broach the subject with the joking trucker.
He pulled off the highway near Pittsburgh into a gas station and café. “The boy who gave me this driving job is a southern boy. Yeah, his daddy owns this company and he told him to give me a job and he pays me the same as he pays the white boys who drive for him.”
Inside the café, he insisted on buying us dinner. We protested, but quickly conceded. “I know you ain’t got no money. One day I might meet you somewhere and you’ll buy me a dinner when you boys are lawyers or doctors or Congressmen.” He laughed. We forced smiles onto our faces.
One of us took turns sleeping in a little berth behind his cab; the other told him jokes, sang songs with him, anything to keep him until Harrisburg just before dawn where we said goodbye, exchanged addresses and made promises about writing. He pushed a $10 bill into my hand.
“You catch a bus, you hear?” He drove off. We waved and extolled his virtues as we asked people where the bus station was.
“I don’t understand why people discriminate,” declared Harvey. Uncle Max had explained that the root cause of discrimination was “economic.” Harvey sneered at such an explanation. “If you pay Negro workers less than white you divide the labor movement and without a united labor force the bosses always have an advantage,” Max had assured us. We didn’t exactly understand it, but something rang true in the statement.
The bus dropped us at the Port Authority and we still had money for the subway. The fare had gone up to 15 cents — from 5 cents when I took my first ride in the 1940s. One week after we’d left Los Angeles, and three weeks after we’d left the Bronx, we got off the Woodlawn Jerome Avenue subway stop at 167th Street and walked up the steep steps from Jerome to Anderson Avenue.
The grass, the corn, the animals, mountains, desert had disappeared as we glumly faced a mid afternoon during one of the dog days of a New York summer. Our spirits fell further when we could not find a single teenage gambler on the street.
Harvey and I nodded goodbyes without sentiment. Over three weeks we’d grown on each other — like a fungus. I rang the bell and my mother wept. My father — he worked night shifts — hurrumphed. I wanted to piss in the corners of my room. My mother made pot roast — only slightly burned — with overcooked string beans, and fresh rye bread. I actually appreciated, for the first time, my mother’s cooking. Well, not exactly the taste of the food!
When the sun went down the guys wandered into the street with their decks of cards to play canasta — for money of course — in the alley behind one of the tenements.
The bookie — he became a lawyer — collected, and patted us on the back. “I never had a doubt you’d make it,” he bragged. Harvey and I told stories, elaborated on our experiences — like getting laid several times, as if — and strutted. We kept this “men of the world” act up for almost a week. By August, the Giants were 13 and a half games out. They won the pennant when Bobby Thompson homered off Ralph Branca in the ninth inning with two out.
I ran into the street. Giant fans screamed with joy. Harvey came down an hour later, almost in tears and promised he’d pay the $50 — which he did over the course of the next few months. It turned out he’d bet several other guys as well, so by losing, his beloved Dodgers’ also brought a huge debt down on him.
School started and thoughts of going into the military vanished with sines, cosines and tangents. Uncle Max wrote my parents, who sent him the money he’d given us. I don’t know why, but I wrote down some notes from my memories of the trip — scraps of which still exist.
At a dinner in late September 1951, with an aunt, uncle and some cousins, my father boasted: “Did you hear what he did? The little pisher* hitchhiked all the way to California and back. How do you like that?”
Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and maker of films, available on DVD from roundworldproductions@gmail.com.
* Yiddish for a young, inexperienced presumptions person.
