The Valley of the Shadow of Death Read online

  When there was no “V” to be had in the South, Kermit Sr. joined millions of blacks in the Great Migration, heading for the industrial centers of the North and West. In 1946 he left his new family—which now included me and my two baby sisters—back in Louisiana, as he caught a train west to California in search of a new life. His sudden departure had them talking back on the bayou. What was he running away from?

  After less than a year, my father found work as a mechanic in Los Angeles, and sent for the family. Madee, my aunt Eldora, my sisters Barbara and Mary Ann, and I followed him west by train. Through the bayou, the cypress forests of Louisiana, and the vast stretches of Texas we rode the segregated car. Denied access to the dining room, we ate our packed lunches. I can still taste the homemade fried chicken, still feel the orange peel breaking apart beneath my fingers. To this day, my sister Mary talks about those oranges. The journey sparked for her a lifetime love of trains, and no trip could begin without a fresh bag of her favorite fruit. For me the cross-country train ride was like a party, as we ran around the car, played with the porters, and watched the plains speed by. It felt magical. I didn’t quite get just where we were going, making the adventure all the more exciting. For my family, like many black migrants, trains would remain forever emotional: symbols of freedom, escape, and the future.

  When we reached the Texas–New Mexico border, we waved goodbye to Jim Crow. The segregated cars of the South were abandoned as we continued west to California. Even as a little kid I remember sensing something special occurring, awaiting a moment of arrival. When the train reached downtown Los Angeles, it pulled into the new Union Station. I’d never seen anything like it, the high ceilings, the chandeliers, the shiny marble floors. I felt tiny. And when I looked around, all I saw were black people, families like ours reunited, children and wives rushing into the arms of fathers and husbands. No eyes stayed dry.

  In California, opportunities for blacks were better than back in the South, and my father soon had steady work as both a mechanic and as a horse trainer at the Santa Anita racetrack. From the time my parents reunited in Los Angeles, they would have eight more children.

  Like my family, most blacks found discrimination less oppressive in the West. One could vote without fear, and earn better wages. In L.A. blacks could shed what poet Paul Laurence Dunbar called “The Mask”: “that veil of racial inferiority and servility mandated by Jim Crow society.” So blacks from Texas and Louisiana, as well as other ex-Confederate states, flocked to Los Angeles in the years in and after World War II, greatly changing the city’s makeup. In 1939 L.A.’s black population numbered less than 40,000; by 1960 it neared half a million.

  As their numbers grew, so did tensions, and doubts. Some blacks began to wonder whether California could live up to its dream. Many of the problems they fled dogged them thousands of miles to the west, in particular, housing. Through the use of various tactics—redlining, blockbusting, and restrictive covenants—banks, lenders, real estate agents, and sellers managed to limit black access to real estate, confining them to certain parts of town.

  Black resentment began to simmer. And the indignation was not just directed at whites, but increasingly turned inward, as the struggle for limited housing intensified. Black families established in Los Angeles for decades, considering themselves urban and sophisticated, resented the constant flood of newcomers, country come-latelys, and uncouth hicks. Thus within the broader racial dynamic emerged an internal competition, one focused upon the date of departure, with the earlier migrants looking down on later arrivals.

  The initial housing destination for blacks in World War II was an area known as Little Tokyo, a Japanese enclave in downtown L.A. Following Pearl Harbor and internment, the area vacated overnight. Buddhist temples turned into Baptist storefronts. Japanese storefronts became squatters’ havens. The black presence became so heavy the district was renamed “Bronzeville.”

  However, as the Great Migration accelerated during and after the war, more and more blacks settled on the east side of the city, south of downtown. Here, in a part of what would come to be known as South Central Los Angeles, called Watts, my father settled our family.

  Originally called Mudtown, in 1900 the district was renamed after the Watts family that donated the land for a turn-of-the-century railroad station. In the twenties Watts was incorporated into L.A. Initially white, in the wake of the Great Migration Watts quickly turned into a black part of town. The large black population was why Los Angeles annexed Watts, as the city council feared that an independent Watts would elect a black mayor. Running through Watts is the Central Avenue corridor, a famous site of black culture known as the “Great Black Way,” or “Harlem West.”

  When we first arrived, my father drove us down the Central Avenue strip. As a boy who had known only the rural South, it blew my mind: bright colored lights and the strange sounds, storefront churches with preachers barking salvation, dandies with shoes shined like mirrors, reflecting the neon above. And the music of Central Avenue, a new kind of jazz, changing from boogie-woogie and swing to bop, ever more dissonant, angular, angry. Those sounds, those lights, those voices: “Come and see . . .” “The end time is near.” Flashes, screams, sirens, jarring chords, it was startling, alluring, a new and unknown world.

  Later, as a teenager, I would ride my bicycle up to Central Avenue. Too young to get into the clubs, I’d steal a listen as the notes escaped through an open door, the sounds of Kid Ory, Dexter Gordon, Lionel Hampton, and Charles Mingus. At home my parents would spin their records on the phonograph, push all the furniture to the edges of the living room, and we would have our own Club Alexander, where family and friends danced late into the night.

  4

  CHARCOAL ALLEY

  THROUGH THE 1950s we remained in Watts, moving from one house to another. However, the expenses of raising a growing family finally drove my father into debt, forcing him to move us into the newly built Jordan Downs housing project. Part of a New Deal housing plan, Jordan Downs and other projects in L.A. were meant to ease the housing crunch facing returning soldiers and the working poor. At first the projects struck me as gorgeous, resembling a manicured campus, green, tidy, organized, with parks and schools. The buildings fit in with the landscape, built just two stories high, with lots of space between. There were no restricted gang territories. It was open, and felt free. In the spring I’d walk up to the fence and watch the baseball games at Jordan High.

  Initially, families had to qualify to gain entry, had to prove employment, and agree to residency standards. But over time the dual plague of gangs and drugs began to bring the projects down. Residents without jobs failed to keep up their property, people started destroying the grounds, litter and graffiti spread. My family did everything they could to keep out the riffraff, but it was sad to see the projects decay and our quality of life decline.

  But, despite the worsening conditions, the strong hand of both parents held our growing brood in line. And as the oldest, I did my part as well. I looked after my siblings and helped my parents run the house. I stayed away from the gangs, even though they courted me, used all of the gang seductions, the girls, the money, the respect, the rep. They had their own way of walking, talking, dressing, and being. They were in, hip, and cool. My father talked to me about them, and put it straight up. If I chose to hang with the gang, then they’d be my family. “Run with them, and don’t come back,” he said.

  Right there I knew the gangs were a dead end. And I had several advantages for keeping them at a distance. They gave me a pass because I was a dedicated athlete. They also didn’t mess with me because I had lovely sisters they wanted to date. I never let them near my sisters, but they kept trying, and they knew if they messed with me they’d have no chance. But most important, the gangs knew I didn’t want in, and knew I would fight to keep myself out.

  As my mother matured she proved herself a natural leader, the head of the household who kept things under control. But as was the family way, whe
n she ruled, she flashed a fierce temper. Discipline had the feel of the Old South.

  If we crossed her, we knew that we would get “the shoe.” Back in Louisiana, Madee was quite a softball player, strong, athletic. But when she threw a shoe, it was straight out of the major leagues, high and hard. Sometimes, I swear, she could throw a curve, the shoe hitting us long after we’d taken a corner on a dead run.

  I still remember a time when my younger brother Kirk came home late, really late, making a mockery out of Madee’s curfew. And she fixed him. She bolted the door and nailed every window in the house shut—except one. And when he tried to snake through that one, she was waiting for him. She slammed the window down on him so that his legs were outside, his chest and arms inside, and then she pummeled him with shoe after shoe. She never let any of us forget that she was the enforcer. Her motto: “Subdue the head and the body follows.”

  And it wasn’t just shoes.

  When my sister Barbara lagged in doing the dishes, engaging in a small act of passive resistance, Madee, her hands covered in flour, just stared at her and returned to kneading the dough. Then, whack, fast as a fired shoe, Madee struck out with her right hand. And there stood Barbara, stunned, a big white handprint across her black face.

  When Gordon, fascinated with fire, set the couch ablaze, Madee made him sit there with a book of matches, light each one, and watch it burn down to the end. By the time the book was empty, Gordon’s fingers looked like hot dogs blackened at a wiener roast.

  But for certain wrongdoings, we Alexander children could only have hoped for Mama’s wrath. If we really upset her, made her feel disrespected, she simply issued those most dreaded words, “wait till your father gets home.” The hours were the slowest and most terrifying, sitting alone in our room and waiting, the fear as harsh as the pain to come. For the girls it would be the cord of an iron, or electrical wires, for the boys a cypress switch. The cords and wires he reused; the tree out back ran bare of low-hanging branches.

  This was the violent code of the South, inflicted, generation after generation, upon all its sons and daughters. We were children of a harsh southern love. Justice wasn’t gentle.

  Besides demanding discipline and responsibility, my mother also stressed education. From her ancestors back home, Madee learned there were two ways for blacks to gain control over their lives: the church and education. They told her that after the Civil War ended and the slaves were freed, no government could protect southern black folk. Reconstruction, called the “glorious failure” for its grand dreams and broken hopes, ended just ten years after the war. At that point the forces of reaction, white “redeemers” and the Ku Klux Klan, did all they could to keep blacks in their place, making sure they couldn’t vote or own land. Southern blacks held paper promises but saw few material gains. The chains of slavery gave way to the walls of Jim Crow.

  For my family the worlds of the church and education provided the antidotes to the injustices of segregation. These two worlds were tightly linked. Several of my ancestors were preachers and they made sure their family got the message: our only peace the church, our only hope the grace of God, the only way to know Him to read His good word. Heeding these words, Madee took it as her mission that all eleven of us would attend private parochial schools, ensuring we received Catholic instruction. And whether it was through formal education or individual study, the power of knowledge stayed with all of the Alexander children for the rest of our lives. Books, we were told, contained knowledge, and knowledge translated to power. No wonder masters kept slaves illiterate, allowed only handpicked Bible stories about turning cheeks and the meek inheriting the earth. Thus we were taught to treasure books, to view them as keys to opportunity.

  There was only one place I was free to go after school: the library. I remember looking at the rows of books on the shelves, setting a goal to complete a book, then a row, then a shelf. My favorites were stories of adventure and survival. From an early age I needed little sleep and became a night owl. Always last to bed, I read by a single lamp into the small hours of the night.

  Finally, for Madee, it was always a world without excuses. You were responsible for controlling your own life. Booker T. Washington was the model, with his message of self-help, self-improvement, and the need to prove your own worth. And he didn’t just say it, he did it. True to his code, he helped others improve through practical study at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. For what Booker T. preached was the truth. You can make all the speeches you want about education and human dignity, but if you aren’t self-sufficient, you end up dependent. Without economic independence you can never be free. That was the lesson of history. So learn your history, she’d say. It makes you who you are. Just don’t let it control where you go.

  As I applied these lessons while growing up, I was constantly reminded of two things: I had exceptional athletic talent and if I didn’t learn to control my temper, my talent was worthless.

  Two incidents in my early life, both dealing with sports and anger, helped mold my future.

  The first took place during a Catholic Youth Organization football game when I was twelve. When the referee blew the whistle, I lost control, yelling, throwing my helmet, and slamming the ball at his feet. My father, watching my meltdown from the sideline, stormed onto the field, grabbed me by the collar, and dragged me away, humiliating me in front of everyone. The five-foot-four ex-Marine then told the coach, a priest from my school, that I would not return to the game until I learned to control myself and stop embarrassing my family. There he was, short but looming, another man of presence. He projected himself, he cast a long shadow. “Do it, or else,” he said. “Yes, sir.”

  The second incident occurred in the boxing ring. My father was a great boxer and taught me the art, knocking me out several times in the process. Once, when I was fifteen, an older, more seasoned fighter thrashed me in the ring. Embarrassed and enraged, I tracked the guy down and damn near beat him to death. Following this explosion, my father dressed down both my boxing coach and me. He told the coach he needed to help me, or all my talents would be wasted. Then he told me that unless I learned to channel my rage, I would “end up just another killer.”

  And he had been true to his words. When he was at the breaking point with Louisianan Kluxers, he channeled his violence into the armed services, took it out on our enemies. When he was ready to explode after being Jim Crowed, instead of getting thrown in jail or lynched he took his anger, packed his bags, and headed west.

  Remember: “Behave, or we’ll bury you.”

  I didn’t forget. I vowed never to let rage control me again. And soon after, at Mount Carmel High School in South Central L.A., I found the release for my anger, as well as my passion: football. Prior to this time I considered baseball my most promising sport. I loved to play it and had magical memories of sitting around the radio with my family as we cheered for Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. But baseball didn’t free my anger like football.

  On the gridiron you could go berserk, you could vent your hate in a way that few legitimate pursuits allowed. Knocking someone out was not only legal, it got you a standing O. In high school the rage remained; it was just better directed. It was violence condoned, and my adolescent fury lashed freely. During football season my whole family came out every Friday night to cheer their rising star.

  In 1959 when I graduated from Mount Carmel I was recruited by universities with Division 1-A football programs. For me the choice came down to two schools: UCLA and USC. I loved Los Angeles and now considered it home. For despite its problems, the city still offered blacks better opportunities than just about anywhere else. It was no racial paradise, but it sure beat Dixie.

  Ultimately, the decision was easy, UCLA. No white university had treated black athletes better. It was at UCLA that Tom Bradley excelled in track and field in the thirties, where Woody Strode and Kenny Washington starred in football before breaking the NFL’s color barrier in 1946, and where Jackie Robinson was a four let
terman, in baseball, basketball, football, and track, before becoming the first black major leaguer in 1947. Furthermore, in 1949, five years before the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, UCLA was the first primarily white college in America to elect an African American, Sherrill Luke, its student body president.

  From 1959 to 1963 I played on both sides of the ball at UCLA, as a cornerback and safety on defense, and at running back on offense. I was honored as an All-American in both football and track, and won the NCAA triple-jump championship. While competing, I studied kinesiology and sociology. At the time my plan was to compete in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, then go on to graduate school, earn a Ph.D., and become a professor.

  However, during my senior year at UCLA, my coaches told me that I would go high in the upcoming draft and could be a professional football player. I was still skeptical, but when they told me I would start receiving an immediate paycheck instead of spending the next seven years in graduate school, that clinched it for me. For the first time since my family moved west, I could pay off their debt.

  In 1963 I entered the draft. At the time there were two professional leagues, and I received offers from both the 49ers of the National Football League and the Broncos of the American Football League. The Niners picked me eighth overall, the Broncos fifth. I signed with San Francisco and moved up north.

  When I left Los Angeles for the Bay Area, I swore I’d stay close with my family. The lessons were well ingrained—be responsible, take care of your own, don’t expect anyone else to do it for you. Like my legendary great-grandfather, I must be the family’s guardian. As the oldest son, and now a professional athlete, it was my job to provide for my mother and ten siblings. Once I started receiving NFL paychecks, I made Madee’s dream of sending all of her children to private schools come true.