Laura home early and rush back in a taxicab. And then she asked if I'd like to go for a drive later. I
felt very lucky.
Laura was home and I was back at the Roseland in an hour flat. Sophia was waiting outside.
About five blocks down, she had a low convertible. She knew where she wasgoing. Beyond
Boston, she pulled off into a side road, and then off that into a deserted lane. And turned off
everything but the radio.
For the next several months, Sophia would pick me up downtown, and I'd take her to dances, and
to the bars around Roxbury. We drove all over. Sometimes it would be nearly daylight when she
let me out in front of Ella's.
I paraded her. The Negro men loved her. And she just seemed to love all Negroes. Two or three
nights a week, we would go out together. Sophia admitted that she also had dates with white
fellows, "just for the looks of things," she said. She swore that a white man couldn't interest her.
I wondered for a long time, but I never did find out why she approached me so boldly that very
first night. I always thought it was because of some earlier experience with another Negro, but I
never asked, and she never said. Never ask a woman about other men. Either she'll tell you a lie,
and you still won't know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the
first place.
Anyway, she seemed entranced with me. I began to see less of Shorty. When I did see him and
the gang, he would gibe, "Man, I had to comb the burrs out of my homeboy's head, and now he's
got a Beacon Hill chick." But truly, because it was known that Shorty had "schooled" me, my
having Sophia gave Shorty status. When I introduced her to him, she hugged him like a sister,
and it just about finished Shorty off. His best had been white prostitutes and a few of those poor
specimens that worked around in the mills and had "discovered" Negroes.
It was when I began to be seen around town with Sophia that I really began tomature into some
real status in black downtown Roxbury. Up to then I had been just another among all of the
conked and zooted youngsters. But now, with the best-looking white woman who ever walked in
those bars and clubs, and with her giving me the money I spent, too, even the big, important
black hustlers and "smart boys"-the club managers, name gamblers, numbers bankers, and
others-were clapping me on the back, setting us up to drinks at special tables, and calling me
"Red." Of course I knew their reason like I knew my own name: they wanted to steal my fine white
woman away from me.
In the ghetto, as in suburbia, it's the same status struggle to stand out in some envied way from
the rest. At sixteen, I didn't have the money to buy a Cadillac, but she had her own fine "rubber,"
as we called a car hi those days. And I had her, which was even better.
Laura never again came to the drugstore as long as I continued to work there. The next time I
saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail. She
had finished high school, but by then she was already going the wrong way. Defying her
grandmother, she had started going out late and drinking liquor. This led to dope, and that to
selling herself to men. Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian.
One of the shames I have carried for years is that I blame myself for all of this. To have treated
her as I did for a white woman made the blow doubly heavy. The only excuse I can offer is that
like so many of my black brothers today, I was just deaf, dumb, and blind.
In any case, it wasn't long after I met Sophia that Ella found out about it, and watching from the
windows one early morning, saw me getting out of Sophia's car. Not surprisingly, Ella began
treating me like a viper.
About then, Shorty's cousin finally moved in with the woman he was so crazy about, and Sophia
financed me to take over half of the apartment withShorty-and I quit the drugstore and soon found
anew job.
I became a busboy at the Parker House in Boston. I wore a starched white jacket out in the dining
room, where the waiters would put the customers' dirty plates and silver on big aluminum trays
which I would take back to the kitchen's dishwashers.
A few weeks later, one Sunday morning, I ran in to work expecting to get fired, I was so late. But