Notebook: Ally Bush
Brown, Claude
When I was a wee colored tot wearing knickerbocker trousers and with a snotty nose, when Ralph J. Bunche was still an honesttogoodness "colored" Negro such as Richard Wright, Sterling A....
...He had a propensity for doing crazy things, like sucking his thumb and one end of his shirt collar simultaneously, catching snakes and playing with them and crying if one of the snakes got away from him...
...The next year or so I frequently encountered Ally on 125 Street and instead of awakening from the Muslim mesmerization he appeared to be getting more deeply involved all the time...
...The last time I was at the New York State Training School for Boys at Warwick, New York, was because Ally Bush hadn't done something I told him to do, and he had given me his solemn promise that he would do it...
...She had never seen anyone kiss a dog in the mouth before, but there was Ally Bush kissing our dog Suzie Cue in the mouth voluntarily and repeatedly and smiling as he did it...
...Tito lived downtown from me, but still in Harlem, on 114 Street...
...Ally Bush was only a nickname, of course, for a dirty-faced, sloppily dressed, awkward, thumb-sucking, light complexioned, thirteen year old, loudmouthed colored boy from Harlem...
...After Mama had gotten to know Ally Bush- she—as did most people—began to like him enough to listen to all the lies he told...
...So I listened while Ally kept ranting on about the Muslim plan for building a black economy within "Goldberg's" economic empire in Harlem...
...When I was a wee colored tot wearing knickerbocker trousers and with a snotty nose, when Ralph J. Bunche was still an honesttogoodness "colored" Negro such as Richard Wright, Sterling A. Brown, E. Franklin Frazier, and other angry colored men of that day, when that bountiful, beautiful black bitch located on the southern side of the Mediterranean Sea and hugged snuggly by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, was being ravished by Europeans in the guise of concern for her poor savage inhabitants and in the name of Christianity, I met Ally Bush...
...his street corner audience is listening to whoever is willing to orate on cold winter nights...
...For nearly one and a half hours I sat with the hope that I was appearing to be interested in Ally's highly enthusiastic praise of Allah, Elijah Muhammad, and the Muslim Movement...
...The next time I saw Ally Bush was six years later...
...I was discharged from Wiltwyck slightly more than a year after Ally Bush had left...
...We hung out together...
...He was getting quite a bit of recognition as a Seventh Avenue deprecator of the "goddam white man" and everyone who had time to listen enjoyed his speeches perhaps as much as I did...
...The next day when I read in the New York Times that the riot at the United Na tions, which protested the death of Patrice Lumumba, had been led by an unidentified Arab who was believed to be the son of an Arabian prince, and saw the photograph of Ally, I laughed for a long time...
...Most people say Ally is innocent but that he will be electrocuted because a white man died, a white bill collector died in Harlem and the "nigger" who had the intolerable nerve to overtly resent the lynching of Lumumba is gonna pay for it...
...The people who listened to him were perhaps the most ignorant in New York City, collectively, but they knew two things that the New York Times in all its wisdom did not know...
...One of the first lies he told me when Tito brought him to my house was that his father was a cop...
...For quite some time Mama thought Ally Bush was crazy, but not merely for kissing Suzie Cue...
...And unlike many of the boys who left Wiltwyck, Ally Bush went home to his parents and not to a foster home...
...A couple of months after my release from Wiltwyck, a good friend of mine was also discharged...
...But neither Tito nor I could begrudge Ally Bush our misfortune...
...He accepted...
...Many of the things he said met with sincere agreement from me...
...Where the hell in that Black Heaven can Allah be...
...Ally often reprimanded me for buying the white man's whiskey and eating the unclean pork he sold to the poor unsuspecting children of Allah who had not yet heard or heeded the "word...
...When I asked what Ally was doing down there, Dad said he was marching around with some more people who he thought were mad about some man in Africa being killed...
...Ally Bush had not changed in the least way since I had seen him at Wiltwyck...
...However, the fervor of the other new Muslims to whom I had listened recently was mild compared to that of Ally...
...Ally had also shown the world that there were a number of people in Harlem who strongly objected to the peckerwoodstyle lynching of Patrice Lumumba, and that their objections, vehemently expressed, could cause as great a furor in the U.N...
...I told her that there was nothing wrong with him, he was just fond of dogs, insects and reptiles...
...I went to Warwick, Tito went to Woodburn Penitentiary for three years, and Ally Bush went to the Elmira Reformatory for three years...
...He bellowed out everything he said, despite the banality of it, and always threatened to kick somebody's ass although he knew that he couldn't beat Claude Brown Ally Bush anyone who was likely to fight back...
...Ally Bush was one of the most harmless people I have ever known, even up at Wiltwyck School for Boys, where I first met him...
...Once I asked Mama why she listened to all the lies that Ally Bush told her when she knew very well that they were merely lies...
...Actually, I was exerting unusual restraint by not telling him that I had also felt strongly about the Muslim Movement as recently as two years ago, and that he would outgrow its absurd assertions...
...I recall Mama asking me several times if Ally Bush was crazy...
...Today, Ally is in jail awaiting trial for murder...
...When Ally spoke on 125 Street and Seventh Avenue his audiences were larger than they had ever been before...
...one whom they knew very well, perhaps better than Malcolm X. Ally had shown them how a "nigger" could go downtown and raise hell in the United Nations about Lumumba's death as he had said Ralph Bunche would have done had he been an "honest to goodness" Negro...
...As I sat in Chock Full 0' Nuts drinking coffee and listened to Ally Bush relate how he had been converted to the Black Muslim faith while serving six months on the Rock (City Prison on New York's Rikers Island), I kept thinking that Ally hadn't changed significantly...
...He waits alone, the Black Muslims have disowned him...
...Ally Bush was fourteen years old when he was discharged from Wiltwyck School for Boys...
...Khrushchev's table-banging...
...He was standing on the corner of 125 Street and Seventh Avenue wearing a fez, espousing black superiority and greeting everyone who approached him with: "As-Salaam-Alaikum...
...Mama retorted that Ally Bush didn't lie, he was just overendowed with imagination, but was a good person nevertheless...
...he just did things without any awareness of possible consequences...
...For I knew that there was but one Negroowned business operating on the street level of 125 Street and that millions of black dollars were going into these businesses each year...
...But, after hearing him seriously relate the black man's supreme sin of creation of the "white Devil" in a test tube, I decided it was time for me to leave Ally and his delusions...
...In fact I had begun to draw the conclusion that no native son could serve as much time as thirty days in any of New York City's prisons without being converted to Black Muslimism...
...Ally could not have been less than twenty-three years old, but he appeared to have merely aged chronologically...
...During the past two years, I had encountered innumerable black Muslim neophytes who were aflame with the "new truths" contained in the message of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad...
...Ally Bush came to our house frequently and often stayed for hours just talking to and arguing with Suzie Cue...
...The members of Ally's audience knew that he was not the son of an Arabian prince or any other kind of prince...
...as Mr...
...lievable...
...The audience also knew beyond a doubt that Ally, even though he was light-complexioned, was a Black Muslim...
...Sometimes Ally Bush would bring pickles, ice cream, cookies, and potato chips with him and would have a party with Suzie Cue, completely oblivious of everyone else in the house...
...One day when I came home from work my father told me that he had seen Ally Bush on television in front of the United Nations building wearing one of those funny looking Arab costumes...
...She even pretended to believe them...
...He talked about moving Harlem's main thoroughfare from 125 Street to 145 Street and giving the enterprising Negro a chance to get a ground floor lousiness establishment going...
...But even after I had left, I still Celt that his new-found cause and convictions were a good thing for him...
...I didn't believe it, but it didn't matter, because people rarely believed anything Ally Bush said and Ally Bush seldom said anything be...
...Tito was his name...
...I invited Ally Bush to join me in a cup of coffee...
...During the next two years I got to know Ally Bush extremely well, we stole together, broke into stores together, played hooky together, and sometimes got caught by the police together...
...Ally Bush lived only a block away from Tito and he began coming uptown with him...
...After the violent demonstration at the United Nations, practically all of Harlem's residents knew and praised Ally...
...He was still loud, a dreamer and an incessant liar...
...The first time my mother encountered Ally she raised an eyebrow and scrutinized him for a long time...
Vol. 10 • July 1963 • No. 3
