Another Little Piece of My Heart Read Online Free Page B

It had something to do with my sense of oppression as a fat kid, and quite possibly with my incipient queerness. But I also had a deepaversion to racism. It was absurd—rock ’n’ roll had taught me that—and repugnant. This feeling was instilled in me, as it was for many people my age, when I saw pictures in the paper of a black teenager named Emmett Till. He’d been lynched in the South for whistling at a white girl. His body was swollen grotesquely, but his mother had insisted on an open coffin at the funeral. This was 1955; I was eleven. His mutilated face was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.
    If it had ended there, I might have lulled myself into believing that racism was a southern sin. After all, we had black next-door neighbors, and my brother and I had a few black friends. No one cared who came and went in the Bronx. But it was different in Manhattan. There were parts of that borough where black kids weren’t supposed to be.
    As a teenager, I often went downtown with friends to see movies or rock ’n’ roll shows, and this time my companion was a black kid I liked a lot (perhaps because he never taunted me for being fat). We were on our way to Times Square when a cop stopped us and ordered us to get off the street. That had never happened to me, and I knew right away why it was happening now, as did my friend. The look on his face, frozen with fear, caused a reaction that I still have when someone makes a racist remark. I was nauseated. The power of that cop, the utter certainty with which he reduced us to helplessness, made me feel like vomiting. I think it was the first moment in my life when I wanted to strike out against authority, a reflex that had so much to do with the way I acted in the sixties. And I was hardly alone—many young people who ran wild in the streets during those years were reacting to a string of events like the one I’ve described. So it wasn’t just a projection of my insecurities that led me to join the movement. It was the memory of standing passively by while the police menaced my friend and glared at me. By the time I turned nineteen, I was old enough to know that I wanted to do something about it.
    A number of my college friends were Freedom Riders. I was tempted to join them, but my cowardice overcame my ideals, so I decided to stay close to home, and I set out to integrate my parents’ “beach club.” It was basically a strip of concrete and lawn on the Bronx side of the Long Island Sound. A large swimming pool was the only luxury, but for working-class Jews this was the closest thing to a golf course, and they wanted the perks that came with such a retreat, including racial segregation.
    That summer everyone there was reading Exodus and sighing over the plight of Jewish refugees trying to make their way to Palestine. I wanted to teach them a lesson in hypocrisy by bringing a black friend to the club as my guest. We figured that she’d be turned away, and our plan was to document it with the tape recorder in her bag; then we’d take the evidence to the city’s Human Rights Commission and, voilà, a blow for justice. But she made such a fuss that the attendant at the front gate let her in. We had the whole pool to ourselves, since everyone else got out of the water when we jumped in. I knew they weren’t actually horrified; they were imitating those who would have done the same thing to them. It was still common in the fancy suburbs—where we would drive just to ogle the elegant homes—to bar Jews from country clubs, and deeds had clauses that forbade selling property to Jews. But here in the Bronx, we were kings.
    Word quickly spread around the club, and my parents were mortified when I came by to introduce my black friend to them. My father sat silently on his beach chair, hands gripping the sides, but my mother’s reaction surprised me. She scolded, half in jest. “Richard,” she said, referring to a pair of pet rodents I’d once sneaked into the house,