Free A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill Page B

home: in Harlem, over in Manhattan, where the Negroes lived. I saw pictures in the
Daily News
of black men with bloodied heads and tough cops with faces like slabs standing in front of them.
    They oughtta kill
all
them niggers, a kid named Tommy Moore said, standing outside Sanew’s, as we looked at the headlines about the riot.
    Why?
    Why?
We’re fightin’ Hitler and the Japs, and the niggers are rioting! Whose side are they on?
    Maybe they got a good reason. The paper says they won’t let them in the army with whites.
    Of course not! said Tommy Moore. They’re
niggers!
They won’t fight!
    But they’re fighting in Harlem!
    That’s different! You can’t fight the Nazis wit’ a knife!
    This was a puzzlement. There were no black people in our part of Brooklyn except for one tall man in overalls, who worked as a super in an apartment house on Fifteenth Street. Nobody seemed to bother him; certainly he didn’t bother anybody. When we traveled with my mother on the subway, we saw blacks, but they behaved like everybody else: dozing or reading newspapers or talking to each other. Joe Louis sure could fight; but when I thought about blacks in the movies I understood what Tommy Moore was saying. In the movies, blacks were always wide-eyed and comical, full of fear, running from ghosts or bad guys or their own shadows. If they saw Nazis with guns, would they say, as so many did in movies,
Feets, get movin’?
    As always, I brought this to the kitchen table. My mother was rushing around, ladling out food. My father had gone to work.
    How come niggers won’t fight? I said.
    What? she said. What did you say?
    The niggers, you know, from Harlem? How come —
    Don’t use that word in this house, my mother said. They are called colored people. Or Negroes.
    Everybody calls them —
    Only bigots call them niggers, she said. And what does a bigot know about fighting? Bigots are cowards and bullies.
    She knew everything.
    When the rioting ended, we were back to news of distant battles. And other matters. A gangster named Lepke went to the chair, and everybody talked proudly about how he wouldn’t squeal on anyone, right up to the end, because he was from Brooklyn and if you’re from Brooklyn, you don’t squeal, ever. Jimmy Durante started saying “umbriago” on the radio, and though nobody knew what this meant, in school we said umbriago as if it were another version of Shazam: a magic word, a curse, a mystery. There were stories about strikes, and people cursed John L. Lewis, who was keeping the coal from reaching the cities. My father wondered how Lewis could be a union leader, anyway. He was a goddamned
Republican.
    Then one wartime winter, there were no cigarettes. My father was always irritated, smoking strange brands, like Wings and Fatima (because the GIs were now using up the entire supply of Camels); the black market had them, he said, and they were holding them back to drive up the prices. Paper matches suddenly disappeared too, so my father started using wooden kitchen matches, snapping the sulfur heads into flame with his thumbnail. Alone in the kitchen I tried to do this many times, and always failed.
    The war went on and on.

15
    A T 378, Big Jack McEvoy was the super. He lived on the first floor fight, with his wife, Mae, his son, Jackie, and his daughter, Marilyn. Everybody in the building thought they were strange people. For one thing, Big Jack was a Giant fan. We never knew another Giant fan, though there was a rumor that a Yankee fan lived on Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue. Both breeds were as rare as Republicans. Big Jack was probably a Republican too.
    He’s a strange bird, my father said one Sunday morning.
    Why? my mother said in an irritated way. Because he doesn’t spend hours in Rattigan’s?
    My father gave her a hard look.
    He’s making good money at the shipyards but he still works as a super, saving every dime, he said. He’s a cheapskate. He comes into the bar and never says a word and takes