CHAPTER THREE

“HOMEBOY”

I looked like Lil Abner. Mason, Michigan, was written all over me. My kinky, reddish hair was cut
hick style, and I didn't even use grease in it. My green suit's coat sleeves stopped above my
wrists, the pants legs showed three inches of socks. Just a shade lighter green than the suit was
my narrow-collared, three-quarter length Lansing department store topcoat. My appearance was
too much for even Ella. But she told me later she had seen countrified members of the Little
family come up from Georgia in even worse shape than I was.
Ella had fixed up a nice little upstairs room for me. And she was truly a Georgia Negro woman
when she got into the kitchen with her pots and pans. She was the kind of cook who would heap
up your plate with such as ham hock, greens, black-eyed peas, fried fish, cabbage, sweet
potatoes, grits and gravy, and cornbread. And the more you put away the better she felt. I worked
out at Ella's kitchen table like there was no tomorrow.
Ella still seemed to be as big, black, outspoken and impressive a woman as she had been in
Mason and Lansing. Only about two weeks before I arrived, she had split up with her second
husband-the soldier, Frank, whom I had met there the previous summer; but she was taking it
right in stride. I could see, though I didn't say, how any average man would find it almost
impossible to live for very long with a woman whose every instinct was to run everything and
everybody she had anything to do with-including me. About my second day there in Roxbury, Ella
told me that she didn't want me to start hunting for a job right away, like most newcomer Negroes
did. She said that she had told all those she'dbrought North to take their time, to walk around, to
travel the buses and the subway, and get the feel of Boston, before they tied themselves down
working somewhere, because they would never again have the time to really see and get to know
anything about the city they were living in. Ella said she'd help me find a job when it was time for
me to go to work.
So I went gawking around the neighborhood-the Waumbeck and Humboldt Avenue Hill section of
Roxbury, which is something like Harlem's Sugar Hill, where I'd later live. I saw those Roxbury
Negroes acting and living differently from any black people I'd ever dreamed of in my life. This
was the snooty-black neighborhood; they called themselves the "Four Hundred," and looked
down their noses at the Negroes of the black ghetto, or so-called "town" section where Mary, my
other half-sister, lived.
What I thought I was seeing there in Roxbury were high-class, educated, important Negroes,
living well, working in big jobs and positions. Their quiet homes sat back in their mowed yards.
These Negroes walked along the sidewalks looking haughty and dignified, on their way to work,
to shop, to visit, to church. I know now, of course, that what I was really seeing was only a big-city
version of those "successful" Negro bootblacks and janitors back in Lansing. The only difference
was that the ones in Boston had been brainwashed even more thoroughly. They prided
themselves on being incomparably more "cultured," "cultivated," "dignified," and better off than
their black brethren down in the ghetto, which was no further away than you could throw a rock.