The highlight of his life was when the Count Basie or Duke Ellington bands came to the train station on their way in or out of town and he handled their baggage. Still, being a Red Cap was one of the better jobs available to black men at the time, with most of their income from tips. Red Caps were not unlike the Pullman porters on the trains themselves, who were so anonymous that customers called every one of them “George.” They were not even worthy of individual names. He must have experienced a demeaning feeling of servitude, of always having to smile and ask white folks, “Carry your bags, suh?” and gratefully reply, “Thank you, suh”-especially for a man who grew up in Alabama. My father, a man of small stature-only about 150 pounds-worked as a Red Cap baggage handler at Penn Station. I screamed and cried as the water scorched my left leg. I reached up to grab hold of something and pulled the pot of hot water onto me. My mother was boiling water on the stove to make grits or boil tea, and I watched her. My first memory is of being three or four years old and standing on a stool in the kitchen when we were living in Brooklyn before moving to the projects. White people had money to get marriage counseling. But there was little anyone could do to help. Even a child like me knew that my father, James Carter Walker, the man after whom I was named-I was a Junior-was a horrid person, a real nasty guy. But by the time I was born in 1947 at New York Hospital in Manhattan, dad was already “Daddy Dearest.” Even a child knows that you do not hurt people like he would my mother. I’m sure moving north to New York City seemed exciting and promising when my parents moved there after getting married in Selma. When the visit was over, my father and his girlfriend-I never forgot her name: Faye from Fayetteville, North Carolina-got in his ’56 Buick, which we were never allowed to ride in, and drove off for a golfing vacation down South. Instead, she offered the other woman a cup of coffee. “You need to look like this,” he told my mother. “See, this is what you’re supposed to look like,” my father said to my mother, proudly showing off the other woman, well dressed, light skinned with ruby red lips, her hair black with fashionably blonde streaks. His wife, Lorena, my mother, was sitting in the living room with me and my younger sister, Beverly. I was about ten years old when my father walked into our apartment in the Melrose projects with his girlfriend. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher. Reprinted by arrangement with Da Capo Press. Excepted from Chapter 2: I’m from the Ghetto, from Dyn-o-mite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times–A Memoir, by
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