My Ghetto, Then and Now
Cureton, George
MY GHETTO, THEN AND NOW The sociologists call it "a neighborhood in transition." For one black youngster growing up in Newark, it was far more personal. They call it a ghetto now, my old...
...One young man got so involved with one of the girls that he wanted to marry her...
...Gold closed earlier than the other shopkeepers because he had already moved to Weequahic...
...My mother, like many of the Negro women, worked as a domestic in a Jewish home...
...Now these corridors would be acquiring a new ethnic fragrance...
...Cohen was visiting us when new linoleum was delivered...
...Jack had thought about moving but he knew that Spruce Street, where the store was located, was the main street for business in our section of the town, so he stayed and put up with the problem...
...Georgie," Mr...
...She used Mrs...
...It got so bad that Jack started packing up all the liquor on the shelves every Saturday night...
...I got involved personally...
...By 1947, the entire neighborhood had become black, except for a few families, and most of their children took the bus every morning to schools in the Weequahic section...
...that just wasn't in his makeup...
...And my part of town became known as a ghetto...
...now I saw that I had, at least, saved myself a lot of trouble...
...I wasn't ready for that...
...Houses that once sheltered first generations from Europe and from the South are now mere shells...
...Whenever either team beat the other, it was considered a successful season by the victor...
...I remember one day when we were sitting out in front of our building, a car pulled up at the Borkins' store...
...Cohen and didn't want to risk offending her...
...He told me that he longed for the old days...
...That's all in the past...
...Willie the vegetable man, who now drives a taxi, stopped me in the street one day recently...
...Ironically, it acquired that name only after the predominantly Jewish population moved out shortly after World War II...
...It was a standing joke among the boys as to which camp they would "go to" the coming summer...
...His mother would shake her head at his choice of colors...
...Many were unable to get jobs in teaching or government...
...Goldberg began her definition at 3:20...
...I might add that after Mom got through fixing them up, they looked better on me than they had on him...
...One of Mom's greatest thrills came when I got my bachelor's degree and she could inform Mrs...
...Were the groups really Communist...
...He showed me scars he had acquired from young punks trying to mug him...
...Knowing that I would get Mikey's hand-me-downs, I tried to get him to choose clothes he thought I would like...
...he told me his father mentioned the Curetons with affection, but the nearest Mr...
...Mom teased him about this...
...he could see how immaculate my mother had always kept Mrs...
...I was invited to one of its parties by a friend, who later wished he had taken my advice and not signed his name to the guest list...
...Cohen's apartment, we had taken over her furniture as well...
...Mrs...
...South Side High was known by the other schools in Newark as the school with the niggers and the Jews...
...Not me," I said...
...American Youth for Democracy" was one of the more exciting groups...
...We joked often about the Negro-Jew makeup of our team...
...Everyone acted as if a storm were coming and he had to stock up before it arrived...
...When her parents sent her away, he flipped his wig...
...If we were chased away, we'd run upstairs to the back porch and watch from there...
...Gold, the grocer, would yell, "Georgie, tell your mother to hurry and get her shopping done because I'll be closing before sundown...
...Cohen that her boy Georgie had "graduated college" and would be teaching in Newark...
...I wondered if perhaps that was also the reason, why Doris and her sister hadn't transferred...
...Cohen, told my mother she would put in a good word for us to the landlord...
...To this day he hasn't completely found himself...
...We play football, we play soccer, We eat matzahs in our locker...
...He wasn't the only Black with Jewish overtones...
...The laugh of the neighborhood was the church above the liquor store...
...I, like many of my black classmates, wore hand-me-downs from a well-to-do Jewish family...
...You know, I think Mrs...
...I remember asking Mrs...
...Though he didn't say it, I'm sure she told him that only Blacks wore colors like that...
...Teams with a few Blacks or Jews did very well, but when the team was all Jewish, or half-Jewish and half-Negro—disaster...
...He knew that the walls were paper thin, and he could talk with Mom and at the same time listen for clients who made it a practice not to be at home when he was around...
...He told us he didn't transfer across town because he was a "schlemiel...
...I guess football just wasn't our sport—or so the coach seemed to imply when he told us to go out and "lose with dignity...
...Before the exodus to Weequahic, the Jewish holidays were exciting times in our neighborhood...
...We had to run for our lives after every game...
...Remember, we were poor...
...he would be sending signals to his friend Bemie, telling him to meet him after sundown...
...During the holidays, we would peer into the synagogue, watch the men and boys with their little round hats, and listen to the strange—to us— chanting...
...Her ego was further inflated when I was chosen as New Jersey's Teacher of the Year...
...Gold could come to this was to tell me that he understood I could get along pretty well with Macbeth, which his son could not...
...If their chanting seemed strange to us, how did they feel about the vociferous "amens" they heard from our churches...
...In any case, I hadn't wholly approved of what went on there...
...Her daughter was crying and trying to hold on to her mother...
...Goldberg told me mean very much to me...
...The grammar school that greeted all the new arrivals to Newark is gone...
...She didn't add that she had never liked the color of the old linoleum and was overjoyed finally to have a color she wanted...
...So I stayed after school...
...Cureton, Cureton," he yelled, and ran over and hugged me...
...How would I have reacted under these conditions...
...where she was going was luxury in comparison to what she was leaving...
...I sometimes wonder how he felt, seeing his last year's school clothes as my this year's school clothes...
...They call it a ghetto now, that neighborhood...
...Doris's mother dressed like a character from Fiddler on the Roof, and she spoke a confusing kind of English...
...We were nice Negroes, she would tell him, and her Mikey and I had played together through the years...
...Mikey's mother, Mrs...
...When the baby was born, nobody was allowed to see it...
...his son Larry is in India...
...I'm sorry," she said...
...He lost his Sara years ago to some man with money...
...This feeling extended to us, as well...
...So Mom thanked Mrs...
...the evidence was visible in the clothes we wore...
...I can understand how the people in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon felt when they were denied the name of Doctor Street...
...The synagogue where I watched for Mikey in his little black hat is now a Baptist Church...
...But this time I gave in and stopped going with the crowd...
...it was the daughter who did the recruiting for the parties and picnics we studs frequented on weekends...
...My mother had worked for Mrs...
...When the war ended, many of my Jewish neighbors moved to the other side of Newark, to the Weequahic section, the part of the town that Philip Roth writes about in Portnoy's Complaint...
...As the deadline approached, things became even more hectic...
...Weequahic's ethnicity was made clear in its cheer: "Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam, We're the boys who eat no ham...
...They asked for Mr...
...The kid, realizing that Willie knew his father, let him go...
...After a few visits, we caught on...
...During the McCarthy era, my friends' membership in these "liberal" groups came home to roost...
...We soon found out that his visits weren't just nostalgia...
...leave...
...As he put it, he has only the past to comfort him in his old age...
...Cohen so long that she had become a complete replica of her...
...My high school has a new name that reflects the black pride of the 60s...
...He was saved from death once by recognizing one member of a group as being the son of a kid who grew up with me...
...Things were changing, though...
...Weequahic's problem seemed to be that all their biggest boys were playing in the band...
...Goldberg, my fifth-grade teacher, what the word "ghetto" meant...
...He couldn't bring himself to say that I must be a pretty smart young fellow...
...I think I read every book published on the concentration camps...
...Cohen felt she was showing her love and appreciation for Mom by leaving the furniture, and I'm sure that Mom appreciated it...
...You could have asked me and I would have told you where I bought it...
...The smells of kosher cooking would be replaced by those of pork chops, chitterlings and other soulful odors, many of them redolent of pork in one form or another...
...She gave me that enthusiastic look that told me 1 was in for a long drawn-out response...
...it was always wrapped from head to toe and tightly clutched in its grandmother's arms...
...One who stayed behind was Morris...
...Every Monday, Jack, the store's owner, would find half his stock broken on the floor because of all the jumping that went on in the church Sunday night...
...But when I was growing up, it was still a mostly Jewish community...
...Borkin...
...The two worst high school football teams in Newark were South Side High and Weequahic High...
...The food at its parties was plentiful, the girls were pretty and the cars they drove were luxurious...
...He rarely spoke to the other merchants...
...Willie told me how proud he was of me, and he wished me continued success...
...Many of the players on the South Side team had cousins on the Weequahic team, so for bragging rights each team played its hardest to win...
...I spent my early years being compared to Mikey, and was constantly harassed by my mother to be a doctor...
...If we were curious about the Jewish religion, the Jews had every right to be just as curious about ours...
...I begged Mom to bleach out "Bradley Beach" from my t-shirt, because I didn't want my classmates making jokes about my visit to Bradley Beach, where the Jewish kids in the neighborhood went to summer camp...
...I was torn: I was 18...
...Not only did we get beaten on the football field, our opponents also wanted to beat us after the game...
...But, as my mother would have said, "They should have such a past...
...Mom couldn't answer the question...
...We boys all knew whose parents did domestic work...
...I was always a little squeamish about white girls kissing black guys and playing around in dark corners...
...Just the same, I didn't know why she would want to cling to memories of that old place...
...Only when Izzy told me about the Warsaw Ghetto did I begin to understand...
...His wife, who was my first-grade teacher, had inherited the store from her father, and he had condescended to run it...
...They consented, realizing that the old black man is living in the past...
...But to us Blacks, what she was leaving was luxury...
...But not all the Jewish kids left our school...
...Vera,"she admonished Mom, "why are you changing the color of the linoleum in the kitchen...
...Cohen was in the neighborhood, we would break all records to get upstairs to reset the stage of memory...
...I still couldn't see, though, how people, knowing that they were going to be killed, wouldn't fight for their lives...
...Deep down, however, I know she would have preferred to buy her own—but that was out of the question...
...Two men got out...
...Aye, Aye, Aye, Weequahic High...
...He'd just laugh...
...When we were playing, I would tell him to take off his shoes because I didn't want them all scuffed and scratched when they came to me...
...I had always wanted to go through Mikey's apartment, but I was only allowed to peer into the kitchen from the corridor, a corridor always graced with the ethnic smells that Sam LeVinson wrote about...
...Cohen's Yiddish idioms to describe our behavior, and she pushed education at us as if it were a mission...
...How Doris managed to get pregnant was a mystery, but she did manage it...
...And whenever the word was out that Mrs...
...We had not only taken over Mrs...
...She did remark, though, that in the South, when Negroes were being lynched, the other Negroes didn't put up much of a fight...
...Some of them forgot that we were, as we used to say, "colored...
...Gold was originally from New York, and he thought himself above the Newark Jews, whom he treated like yokels...
...After all, it was her first home and the place where her children were born...
...I had to know more...
...Mom replied cautiously...
...Nor did most of what Mrs...
...But when I went back there to address the students, I begged their indulgence to call it South Side High...
...Would you believe that she was upset because we were replacing the old, worn out linoleum she had left...
...Our family not only inherited Mrs...
...The South Side team was made up of Jews and Negroes...
...The Jewish religion fascinated us...
...He laughed, trying to point out to me the safety of the neighborhood at that time...
...We could have given them a more colorful term than "ghetto" to identify where the black folks lived...
...She didn't let her two girls out of her sight except to go to school...
...I later learned that the Borkins belonged to a Communist group...
...My senior year in high school was the most socially active period I had ever known...
...Cohen's apartment and her furniture, we also inherited a Jewish mother...
...Wait and see me after school," she replied, "and I'll tell you all about the word...
...They call it a ghetto now, my old neighborhood in Newark...
...As Willie, the vegetable store owner told me, "Gold thinks he's better than I am...
...Ours was that nearly all our good players were ineligible because of grades...
...I wanted to move where my friend Mikey, son of my mother's employer, had lived...
...Gold's son turned up in a summer school literature class I attended...
...I'm sure that Mrs...
...Had "The Three Little Pigs" ever been read in that building...
...And it wasn't there...
...Oh no, I thought, whatever the word means it must be something bad...
...He'd talked to my mother, too, and she had warned me about going off with "that gang...
...As the Jewish families moved away, the Negro families moved into their apartments...
...I tried to get her to postpone her definition, but she was eagerly insistent: "No, you wait after school...
...he asked him...
...I was to wait after school and see her...
...Perhaps...
...We moved in...
...Some of my friends didn't...
...After all its psychological and sociological ramifications had been explained, I came away with just one thought: How easy it was to rhyme the word with Moe, Joe and Steptoe, nicknames of some of my friends and classmates...
...Kid, aren't you a Kettle...
...I had been alerted not to get too involved by Mose, an old man in the neighborhood who told all of the young Negro boys that we would live to regret ever getting mixed up with those white folks...
...I always searched for Mikey among the sea of little black hats...
...He is the author of "Action Reading," an elementary school reading program used throughout the United States...
...None of my pleading had the slightest effect...
...Braustein, where you got it, is dead, and the shop is now a storefront church...
...She was still going on at 4:00, when the janitor informed her that he had to clean her room, a signal for her to George Cureton, who was selected National Honorary Teacher of the Year in 1969, is Associate Professor of Humanities at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York...
...It's scarcely recognizable...
...Izzy the fishman, who had arrived from Poland, also told me gruesome stories...
...If they needed a word with sociological implications, why didn't they ask us...
...And all because of some mysterious word that white folks used to characterize my section of town...
...He is a defeated man...
...Jack," she said one day, "I wonder if they're not adding a little extra shouting and leaping just to destroy the devil that's under them...
...But the ghetto was on its way...
...It also nearly led to trouble for years to come, as it did for many of my classmates, who happily joined clubs that later turned out to be Communist fronts...
...Then you could have gotten more just like it...
...She didn't have to tell him we were clean...
...Would black folks have gone to concentration camps without resisting, as I had read that Jews had done...
...the father was an unnamed black dude in the neighborhood...
...She still worked for Mrs...
...Cohen's house...
...Cohen and promised to keep the rooms just as they were...
...Showing Look Magazine to Mrs...
...We knew it was a boy, however, because whenever Doris and her sister got into one of their heated arguments about the baby—and this happened almost every day—it was a boy's name that they tossed about...
...However, one day Mrs...
...I had felt somewhat ashamed at not having signed my real name at any of the parties...
...I did whatever I wanted to...
...Cohen wanted Mom to take her old apartment so that she could drop in to reminisce...
...Cohen's husband also seemed to have a fondness for the apartment, for he would stop by whenever he was in the building to collect insurance premiums from the tenants...
...But before she did so, she had me look up "ghetto" in my school dictionary...
...He had tears in his eyes as he went back to his taxi...
...Cohen and pointing out my picture was one of the great highlights in her life...
...So much of the Jewish culture was brought into our home that when everyone was talking about the Holocaust, Mom would retell the stories she had overheard in the Jewish homes to my aunt, and we children would have nightmares...
...Borkin started screaming at them, calling them fascists, so they took her, too...
...after that we would signal his clients by tapping on the pipes when he appeared...
Vol. 8 • June 1983 • No. 6
