even curse customers, especially servicemen; I couldn't stand them. I remember that once, when
some passenger complaints had gotten me a warning, and I wanted to be careful, I was working
down the aisle and a big, beefy, red-faced cracker soldier got up in front of me, so drunk he was
weaving, and announced loud enough that everybody in the car heard him, "I'm going to fight
you, nigger." I remember the tension. I laughed and told him, "Sure, I'll fight, but you've got too
many clothes on." He had on a big Army overcoat. He took that off, and I kept laughing and said
he still had on too many. I was able to keep that cracker stripping off clothes until he stood there
drunk with nothing on from his pants up, and the whole car was laughing at him, and some other
soldiers got him out of the way. I went on. I never would forget that-that I couldn't have whipped
that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind.
Many of the New Haven Line's cooks and waiters still in railroad service today will remember old
Pappy Cousins. He was the "Yankee Clipper" steward, a white man, of course, from Maine.
(Negroes had been in dining car service as much as thirty and forty years, but in those days there
were no Negro stewardson the New Haven Line.) Anyway, Pappy Cousins loved whisky, and he
liked everybody, even me. A lot of passenger complaints about me, Pappy had let slide. He'd ask
some of the old Negroes working with me to try and calm me down.
"Man, you can't tell him nothing!" they'd exclaim. And they couldn't. At home in Roxbury, they
would see me parading with Sophia, dressed in my wild zoot suits. Then I'd come to work, loud
and wild and half-high on liquor or reefers, and I'd stay that way, jamming sandwiches at people
until we got to New York. Off the train, I'd go through that Grand Central Station afternoon rushhour
crowd, and many white people simply stopped in their tracks to watch me pass. The drape
and the cut of a zoot suit showed to the best advantage if you were tall-and I was over six feet.
My conk was fire-red. I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was "sharp." My
knob-toed, orange-colored "kick-up" shoes were nothing but Florsheims, the ghetto's Cadillac of
shoes in those days. (Some shoe companies made these ridiculous styles for sale only in the
black ghettoes where ignorant Negroes like me would pay the big-name price for something that
we associated with being rich.) And then, between Small's Paradise, the Braddock Hotel, and
other places-as much as my twenty-or twenty-five-dollar pay would allow, I drank liquor, smoked
marijuana, painted the Big Apple red with increasing numbers of friends, and finally in Mrs.
Fisher's rooming house I got a few hours of sleep before the "Yankee Clipper" rolled again.
It was inevitable that I was going to be fired sooner or later. What finally finished me was an angry
letter from a passenger. The conductors added their-bit, telling how many verbal complaints
they'd had, and how many warnings I'd been given.
But I didn't care, because in those wartime days such jobs as I could aspire to were going
begging. When the New Haven Line paid me off, I decided it would be nice to make a trip to visit
my brothers and sisters in Lansing. I had accumulated some railroad free-travel privileges.
None of them back in Michigan could believe it was me. Only my oldest brother, Wilfred, wasn't
there; he was away at Wilberforce University in Ohio studying a trade. But Philbert and Hilda
were working in Lansing. Reginald, the one who had always looked up to me, had gotten big
enough to fake his age, and he was planning soon to enter the merchant marine. Yvonne, Wesley
and Robert were in school.
My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars. I
caused a minor automobile collision; one driver stopped to gape at me, and the driver behind
bumped into him. My appearance staggered the older boys I had once envied; I'd stick out my
hand, saying "Skin me, daddy-o!" My stories about the Big Apple, my reefers keeping me skyhigh-
wherever I went, I was the life of the party. "My man!... Gimme some skin!"
The only thing that brought me down to earth was the visit to the state hospital in Kalamazoo. My
mother sort of half-sensed who I was.
And I looked up Shorty's mother. I knew he'd be touched by my doing that. She was an old lady,
and she was glad to hear from Shorty through me. I told her that Shorty was doing fine and one
day was going to be a great leader of his own band. She asked me to tell Shorty that she wished
he'd write her, and send her something.