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The 1981 movie Fort Apache, The Bronx, starring Paul Newman, takes place in the police precinct where I lived. In the movie, the neighborhood is depicted as an urban sinkhole, block after block of burned-out tenements, garbage-strewn streets and weed-choked lots, populated by gangs, junkies, pimps, hookers, maniacs, cop killers and third-generation welfare families. That is not quite the Hunts Point I was raised in, although it was hardly elm trees and picket fences. We kept our doors and windows locked. I remember a steel rod running from the back of our front door to a brace on the floor so that no one could push in the door. Burglaries were common. Drug use was on the rise. Yet crime and violence in those days did not begin to suggest the social breakdown depicted in Fort Apache. That was yet to come.
I have been asked when I first felt a sense of racial identity, when I first understood that I belonged to a minority. In those early years, I had no such sense, because on Banana Kelly there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican or, as we said in those days, a Negro. Racial epithets were hurled around and sometimes led to fistfights. But it was not "You're inferior--I'm better.'' The fighting was more like avenging an insult to your team. Among my boyhood friends were Victor Ramirez, Walter Schwartz, Manny Garcia, Melvin Klein. The Kleins were the first family in our building to have a television set. Every Tuesday night we crowded into Mel's living room to watch Milton Berle. On Thursdays we watched Amos 'n' Andy. We thought the show was marvelous, the best thing on television. It was another age, and we did not know that we were not supposed to like Amos 'n' Andy.
In February of 1954, thanks to an accelerated school program rather than any brilliance on my part, I graduated from Morris High School two months short of my 17th birthday. Except for a certain facility in unloading prams at Sickser's, a neighborhood store where I worked part time, I had not yet excelled at anything. I was the "good kid," the "good worker," nothing more. I did well enough at Morris to win a letter for track, but after a while I found slogging cross-country through Van Cortlandt Park boring, and so I quit. I switched to the 440-yd. dash, because I could get it over with faster, but I dropped out after one season. We had a basketball team at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church. I was tall, fairly fast and the senior warden's son, and the coach was inclined to give me a chance. I spent most of the time riding the bench, so I quit the team, to the relief of the coach. In later years, I frequently found myself asked to play or coach basketball, apparently out of a racial preconception that I must be good at it. As soon as I was old enough to be convincing, I feigned a chronic "back problem" to stay off the court.