MYSTORY: The Originalby

Harold Lee Rush©2009

Published in the United States

with Global Rights 12/09/2009

by HAROLDLEERUSH

First Edition Volume 1

ISBN 1453626069

EAN-13 9781453626061

Chapter 1: Hell Aint Half Full Yet

Putting my life on paper is something I’ve been doing in one form or another for a long time, sometimes as spoken word poetry and sometimes as events documented. When I was very young, eleven or twelve, I got the idea to save things about me, to document myself. Later I realized this had something to do with my sense of identity, of wanting to feel that I was somebody in the world. When I read “Invisible Man” and “1984” as a teenager, I saw that the world would disappear your ass in a heartbeat, or worse, ignore you completely. It seemed that the Black world I lived in didn’t exist in the world on tv, in the movies or in the papers, and thus, I didn’t exist either. My family, friends, neighbors, nobody I knew existed outside of us. One day it hit me that I was looking at a white world, it was this white world that we didn’t exist in. And since this white world seemed to be the only world that mattered. I wanted to matter. I was born half-way into the 20th century, 1950. My being a ‘junior’ was a problem for me as a kid because I thought it meant I was a continuation of someone, of something but I didn’t know who or what that was. I heard stories about my father being a basketball star in college and that he even played for the Harlem Globetrotters for a minute, but since we had no relationship, I never knew what was myth or what was true. I just remember resisting feelings of being a reject every time I saw or heard that ‘junior’. I was determined to make my name mean something, so that I would matter.

My earliest memories are of living in an apartment in Morgan Park on the South Side of Chicago. My mother, my two younger brothers and me. I believe it was in a building owned by my stepfather’s mother or sisters. Calling Stephen my step-father is a stretch because he was only married to my mother for a second or two and we never lived with him that I can recall. I do remember that he worked at the Cook County Jail, that he drank a lot and he had a room at his mother’s house where I once found these dime novels that had sex stuff in them. I was maybe eight or nine then and most of it I didn’t understand, but what I did comprehend excited me even then.

We moved into a house shared with the owner, a lady named Miss Bell. I have good memories of the time there, although I started a fire that burned the house down. Miss Bell was an older woman who looked after us while my mother was at work. My mother worked two jobs, as a schoolteacher and as a counselor at the Better Boys Foundation. Sometimes we’d only see her for a few minutes in the mornings and on the weekends in the evenings. My brothers and I were normal bad-ass little boys and we probably gave Miss Bell hell most of the time. She would go out sometimes and we’d utilize that time to shake down the house, just being nosy kids. Lo and behold, we discovered a sack full of coins in her bedroom! Over the next few weeks, we’d steal handfuls of pennies, nickels and dimes to spend at the candy story a couple of blocks over. Eventually, of course, she noticed, told my mother, who investigated by visiting the candy store and got the facts. Mom proceeded to do pull her ‘midnight whoopin’ thang; when she would come in from work, wake us up, and whoop our ass! This was my worst nightmare, especially when we didn’t know it was coming. You see,

most times we knew because we’d been busted for one thing or another, so we’d be awake waiting. Those times, when she’d come in and start whoopin us, we’d duck and dodge, bob and weave all over the room, managing to elude some of the licks. But once in a while, we’d get caught by surprise, like the stolen coins episode.

Burning down the house was an accident, a classic ‘playing with matches’ incident. This caused me years of trauma. This house, in Morgan Park, was a nice big old house, with an enclosed back porch and back yard. My mother created our first library there, converting a hallway closet by putting shelves from top to bottom. She’d buy books every chance she got and I spent many hours sorting through them and reading to my younger brothers, Gerald (two years younger) and Reggie (four years younger). I read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries too. I also read National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. I communed with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Many nights I’d read under cover with a flashlight till I fell asleep. Miss Bell would put the newspapers on the back porch and I would sneak out there at night sometimes to read. One night my flashlight batteries were low, so I tried reading by match light. I heard Miss Bell coming to the kitchen, so I dropped the 6 papers and ran back to the bedroom in the back, believing the matches were out. Apparently not, as a while later, we were hurriedly awakened and rushed out of the house, as the house burned down. I’ll never forget huddling in front of the house, in blankets the Red Cross gave us and not even realizing that I was the cause of that fire. Only days later did it hit me and I was haunted for years by the guilt. My mother had to send us to live with her parents in Kentucky for a year and I actually had my grandmother as my teacher that year.

Glasgow, Kentucky is the county seat of Barren County, a few hundred miles from Louisville. My mother would send us ‘down south’ during the summer break every year, so we were familiar with the little town. In the earlier years, roughly 1958-60, my mother’s brother’s children would be there also, so we got to hang with our cousins. Even though they lived in Chicago, we hardly ever saw them. To some degree, we were privileged kids because my grandfather was a baptist minister and my grandmother was one of the first teachers. In fact, she had been my mother’s teacher all thru elementary school. I wasn’t conscious back then of the colorism factors: my grandfather was fairly light-skinned with straight hair, while my grandmother was dark. My grandfather would take us places and we were treated somewhat special as “Rev Murrell’s grandkids from Chicago”. Even white people treated my grandfather with a little respect. They called him “Reverend”, while they called most Black men “boy”. At that age, I was aware of some aspects of race but I wasn’t racially conscious. I knew that we were negroes and they were white people. I knew there were certain things we couldn’t do and places we couldn’t go but I wasn’t real clear on the whys. I knew that the Black people thought we were different, even though we all lived in ‘the kingdom’, as the Black area was called. My grandfather’s brother, Arthur, had a big farm back then and we loved to go out there. Uncle Arthur had five daughters, no sons and, looking back, I realize they were all light and were considered ‘fine’. I was grown before I understood we were supposed to be part of the colored elite of Glasgow. Those summers were a special time in my life.

The year I spent there after the fire was different. I learned first hand about being Black in the south.

The fact that my grandmother was my teacher that year was coincidence. She taught fifth grade, which was the grade I was in. Of course, I caught hell in school because everyone thought I was 7 getting special treatment because she was my grandmother and she gave me more work, in school and after, to show that I wasn’t. Plus we had ‘chores’ and they were unavoidable. In Chicago, I could trick my brothers into handling my share of work, but grandma wasn’t havin’ it. I had to beat rugs, clean the entire house (seemed like), clean the yard, pick weeds in the garden, slop hogs and clean the chicken coop. (Okay, the last two I made up, but it was almost). Until I started writing this book, I hadn’t thought about certain things, like my grandmother wouldn’t let us go to the other kids houses to play (she called them “them little heathens”); we had to be in church every Sunday and sing. This was the church down the street, where my grandmother had been a member forever and my mother and uncles had attended all their lives at home. My grandfather wasn’t the pastor however. He never had a church that I recall. He just traveled all over Kentucky and Tennessee preaching. We went with him many times and he’d have us sing. He seemed to specialize in Baptist Conventions. I don’t know how many times “Rev Murrell’s grandsons” sang “I want to be ready” in those years, but it was enough that I detest that song to this day. I do remember riding in the front seat of my grandfather’s corvair and listening to him talk about all kinds of things that only many years later would I understand. One of my favorite sayings of his was, “Go head, fool, hell aint half full yet!”, which would be said to someone passing us in a hurry on the highway.

My first major racial episode occurred when our school went on a trip to the town movie house. Once a year, all the schools, including the colored school, (named Ralph Bunche, of course), got to attend a school day showing of some movie. I don’t recall what the purpose of this was, but I do remember we had to take a can of lard to school in order to go. I guess it was a way of building the school’s supply of cooking grease for our lunches. Anyway, we got on the school buses and went downtown. When we get to the show, we unload and all the Black folks go around to the back and up the steps to the balcony. Me, being from Chicago, didn’t know that’s where all the Black people had to go. At home, we sat anywhere in the show. Of course, the whole neighborhood was segregated but we didn’t realize it. As the movie started, I saw that there were seats downstairs that were closer, so I told a couple of the other students I was going down there. They just looked at me like I was crazy, but I had no idea why. I went downstairs, strolled down to about the fourth or fifth row and 8 sat down. The joint got quiet and the white kids sitting around me got up and moved. After a few minutes, a cop came down and asked me what the hell I thought I was doin’. I don’t recall what I said, but I do remember he took me by the arm, walked me out of there and they put the whole colored school out. Nobody said anything on the bus on the way back and my grandmother never said anything to me. When we got home, she and grandaddy talked privately and he took me out in the backyard and told me that, while what I did wasn’t wrong, I was not to do it again because it scared the white folks to death and

they might not let the negro school come there again. Worse, they might have taken me away and nobody would’ve heard from me again. I really didn’t comprehend this at all but after that, I was a hero to the boys at school. They thought I was the bravest dude in the world. I just wanted to see the movie better. Little did I know this was a prelude to my getting banned from the state the next summer. More on this later.

My mother brought us back to Chicago at the end of Summer 1961, where we lived in one room in an apartment with two older ladies. It was a tight squeeze, my mother, my two brothers and me in one room, but we were glad to be with our mom. She went through a period of religious fanaticism and we were going to church almost every night. It was at 63rd and Halsted, under an evangelist named Baker. I became caught-up in religious fervor and even preached a little. But this was somewhat driven by my guilt about setting the house on fire. Finally I broke down and told to my mother what I’d done. When the weight fell away from me, I understood for the first time how confession is good for the soul. I was able to sleep peacefully for the first time in years and I could look her in the eye again without shame.

About six months later, we moved into a house (614 e. 92nd Pl), where life changed dramatically over the next few years. This was the first house that was ours, not shared with anyone. This was a middle class community, just south of Chatham, and still mostly white. We went to Burnside school, which was fairly integrated, although it was changing fast. ‘White flight’ was in full effect but we weren’t aware of it. Years later I realized my mother had been able to purchase that house ‘on contract’, as part of the infamous ‘block busting’ program, where real estate brokers would use a Black family to scare the whites into selling fast before the property values fell and they’d lose their investment. For most of my youth, I watched this process without understanding it was a program of greed and Black people were used to make millions for politicians and real estate brokers, breaking up neighborhood after neighborhood, south and west. My mother, in wanting a better environment to raise us in, was one of those Black people used. Twice after this, we were able to move into mostly white areas and watch as for sale signs go up virtually overnight. For a long time I thought this was the natural order of things. At Burnside school I had my first brush with fame and my first racial embarrassment. Gwendolyn Brooks was Poet Laureate of the state at the time and sponsored poetry writing contests at Chicago Public Schools. I entered and won first place for my grade (7th) and Ms Brooks came to the school to recognize the winners and give out awards. I don’t remember the poem, just her, a ‘famous’ person, telling me to “keep writing” because my work was good. Many years later we met again and I was able to thank her her for inspiring me. She was one of the reasons I visited so many schools years later when I was a local ‘celebrity’. My racial embarrassment came when a white girl in my class came to school one day wearing a button that said, “Support the N.A.A.C.P.” I asked her what it stood for and she laughed at me and made a big deal out of it in front of everyone, painstakingly explaining that it was an organization for “you negro people” and that her family were lifetime members. I felt about two inches tall and right then, I swore I would never again let a

white person know more about my own people than me. Our time in this house was bittersweet. Once we ditched school for a month, causing my middle brother, Gerald, to be held back a year; we stood off some bullies on the front porch; I stole money from my mother to buy radios; Carol became our adopted sister; the IRS took two months pay from my mother for back taxes (putting her in a hole she couldn’t recover from) and John F. Kennedy was shot while I was standing my corner as a Patrol Boy.

The first cover of “Being Single” magazine 1984

I Am Black ChicagoI am Black ChicagoBorn on the southsideFlavored with the west-sideFootprints on the north sideA Provident babyDelivered by dr steptoeWent to school in a willis wagonAnd 6 or 7 grammar schoolsFrom shoop to burnside to lewis-champlainHung out at the YMCALearned to shoot pool at the BBFGot fifty-leven cousins all over Chi-townSome of them were the true OGB’s(original gang-bangers, back in the day)growing up Black in ChicagoI know what it meantTo get out of cicero before darkTo get off the ‘L’ downtownAnd have the po-leece jack you upI remember when we couldn’t go toMarshall Field’s, Carson Pirie Scott or Sears & RoebuckI laughed my troubles away at Riverview(way before Go Cart Land & Fun Town)listened to the poets and drummersas they Pointed to the Afro-Artsbefore there was Earth, Wind and Firethere was Artistic Heritage Ensemblewhen Amazon and Hiddekel were learning how to braidwhen Darlene Blackburn was just starting to dancewhen OBASI came on the scenewhen the Bud Billiken Parade was Black folks(and mickey mouse wouldn’t be caught dead in washington park)and blue lights in the basement quarter partiesis where I first learned how to ‘grind’and got fonky with James Brown’s ‘cold sweat’drinking white port and kool-aidsmokin reefer and doo-whoppin under the viaductgoing to Lem’s for some tips at 2AMand throwing up at 4being ‘gouster’ or ‘ivy league’working at 63rd and halstedsneaking in the showputtin’ balloons on the spokes of our bikesand riding up and down the rampsof the dan ryan before it openedseeing the 5 Stairsteps beat the Jackson 5at the Regal Theatre talent showsditching classes by hiding out in the oldest partsof the ‘castle’ of Englewood

I am Black ChicagoWhere Soul Train startedWhere Chaka Kanye West come fromWhere Quincy Jones sat at the feet of the eldersIn Bronzeville’s international music collegesWhere you can jet to ebony to defend her

Who walks around all day with nothing on butW-V-O-Nthe voice of the negro/nationGwen Brooks sprang from the breast of usHarold Washington spoke to the best in usthe policy kings organized the rest of usand the mobs have truly tested ustried to turn our heroes into dust to duststole our history-left us pixie dustbut they never really busted uswhere we used to own the votewhere we used to hold the notewhere we used to sail our boatwhere we put fur to coatI am Black ChicagoAfrica was my motherDuSable was my fatherI have family all over americaAnd you may even be kin to meThis is where Charlie chewedWhere Nat Cole kingedWhere Joe Louis scronchedWhere Lena horned and Billie holidaidWhere Ernie bankedWhere Oscar brownedWhere Jerry butleredWhere the Duke was earledWhere Yvonne danieledAnd the Chi-Lites seen herWhere engle woodedWhere princeton parkedWhere chester fieldedWhere rose landedWhere cottage grovedWhere altgeld gardenedWhere spooks sit by the doorAnd Pervis don’t want to talk to no mensI am Black ChicagoFrom the lakefront all the way to ford cityFrom heavenston down to cal cityFrom maywood to blue islandThat’s me in gary and over in k-townThis is where freedom rangWhen Mahalia sangWhere GoodFellows clubbedAnd schoolteachers subbedWhere thousands have passed thru the cook county jailAnd the almighty hawk’s told many a taleWhere Dr Margaret told us children we were BlackAnd carried a whole museum on her backI’m the projects and the GlobetrottersI’m baptist and catholic and santifiedAnd the Nation of IslamI am the center of ChicagoAnd the soul of your lifeI am Black Chicago.

History is not the past, its how the story is told.This is my story.

-Harold Lee Rush-