From the Outside Page 2

  It was difficult enough to be plopped down in a part of the nation I knew little about, but it was also a couple of months after the school year had gotten under way. Those months made a huge difference. The cliques had been formed, the judgments, even if rash, made. Now here comes this new kid from somewhere out west. Seriously, what chance did I have to fit in?

  I wasn’t the only one in the Allen household who had trouble making the adjustment this time.

  When my mother dropped me off on my first day of eighth grade at Ebenezer Junior High, she burst into tears as she noticed how run-down and dirty the school was and that it was across the street from a cemetery.

  Driving a little farther down the block, you ran into farms, one after another, and woods. We were living in the country, no getting around it, and in some ways, it felt like living in the past. Nothing against the country—there were a lot of wonderful people in those parts—but it was a very tough transition for us, and while we were there to serve, my mom felt guilty, as any parent would.

  To give you a sense of what we had to deal with, the drinking water in the fountains at Ebenezer came out orange at first because of the rusty pipes. You drank it anyway. Unless you wanted to go thirsty for the rest of the day.

  Even so, my siblings and I didn’t complain. That’s probably because, from the time I could first remember, we didn’t have very much. The government paid for our housing, but every other expense was left to us.

  Other families in Dalzell, to be fair, had it just as bad, but because there were five kids in our family—I was the middle child—there was less of everything to go around. I walked with holes in my shoes and put clothes on layaway. On occasion, I wore stuff handed down from my brother, John, who was three years older, but I grew so fast, nothing fit for long. All of us knew every two weeks when it was payday; it meant there would be groceries, which we stretched out for as many days as we could.

  You found a way to get by, simple as that, which had also been the case when we lived in California. Back then, though, there was one time I let our situation get to me and made a terrible mistake. I was 11 or 12 years old when I went into the grocery store on the base and stole a box of licorice. I was hungry and knew better than to ask my mom for money we didn’t have. I carefully hid the licorice in the sleeve of my jacket and walked to the door, thinking I was so damn clever.

  I was an idiot. The clerk behind the counter was in my face quicker than Gary Payton. The police soon arrived and put me in the back of a cruiser to take me to the station.

  Before I knew it, I was sitting on a chair in a small room that didn’t have any windows. The minutes felt like hours. I was scared to death. All for a lousy box of licorice.

  The crazy thing is, the cops didn’t scare me. My parents did. I would rather have been arrested than have to deal with them.

  First Mom, who, whenever I’d acted up before, didn’t hesitate to use a belt. She didn’t have to say much this time. The look of disappointment she gave me was enough.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” she told me. “I can’t wait until your dad comes home.”

  That’s where I lucked out. Dad was serving in South Korea on a one-year tour. Come to think of it, that might very well be why I also took the risk in the first place. He couldn’t spank me with a belt, his typical form of punishment, from 7,000 miles away.

  Yell at me, that he could do, and I couldn’t blame him. Because of what I had done, there was a chance he would lose one of his stripes, and stripes meant everything in the armed forces.

  Thank God he didn’t. I would never have forgiven myself. By the time he came home two months later, all was forgotten. All except the lesson I learned: don’t ever take anything that doesn’t belong to you.

  There were other lessons growing up, some just as painful.

  Once in South Carolina a friend told me I could borrow a pair of his shorts, which he would bring over to my house the night before school. I needed them badly. For weeks, I had been going back and forth between the same two pairs of jeans. The other kids noticed and didn’t hesitate to let me hear about it. I’d show them. I would walk down the halls of Ebenezer Junior High wearing my new shorts, and no one would be able to make fun of me.

  I sat by the window that night and waited for my friend, and waited . . . and waited.

  He never showed up. Whatever his excuse was, I don’t remember. All I remember is how determined I was that the day would come, sooner rather than later, when I wouldn’t have to depend on anyone ever again, for anything. That included my parents, especially my father. As tight as money was in our house, he could have helped out more.

  Countless mornings, around five o’clock, I was awoken when he pulled into the driveway after being out with his friends all night. I was constantly amazed how he’d still be ready to go to work a few hours later, as if he’d been asleep the whole time. Even so, the money he spent meant there would be none left for me to buy food in the school cafeteria.

  “Why don’t you have lunch?” the other kids used to ask.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  I thought it was better to lie—to them and, I suppose, to myself—than to put up with more humiliation; I was still getting my share from wearing the same two pairs of jeans.

  My father, it needs to be pointed out, was respected by everyone at work, and the men he supervised learned a great deal from him. Nonetheless, as smart as he was, he didn’t advance in his career as far as he could have. I made a promise to myself right then and there: whatever job I get when I grow up, I’ll work as hard as I can. No matter how I felt about some of the choices he made, he was my father, and I loved him.

  Mom, on the other hand, wasn’t always as understanding, and one time she paid for it. She and my father were having an argument when he got a little physical with her. I tried to force my way between them, but he was rough with me as well. I was 13 years old. I didn’t stand a chance.

  Why did my mother stay with him? Well, they did separate, a couple of times. When my father went off to Korea, on two separate tours, the reason that we didn’t go with him, my siblings and I suspected, was because he and Mom wanted to determine if the time away from each other might do the marriage some good. Whether it did or not, I have no clue. I don’t recall any changes in how they treated each other when he got back, but I was hardly the best judge.

  Our financial situation, I have to believe, played a role in her trying to patch things up. Whatever he did with his evenings, he brought home a paycheck every two weeks, and with so many mouths to feed, that was not to be taken lightly.

  Even with her other responsibilities Mom somehow found time to work two jobs: as a cashier at a gas station, and cleaning homes on the base after the residents had moved out. She went through every inch of the place: scrubbing the toilets, walls, and floors, and washing the baseboards, the rest of the family pitching in. The extra cash she brought in made a huge difference.

  She was no stranger to hard work, that’s for sure. Growing up in rural Arkansas during the late ’50s, she used to rush out to the fields to help her parents and siblings pick cotton as soon as she got home from school.

  Earlier, in California, I made some money of my own, by mowing lawns.

  That was a big deal at Edwards Air Force Base, with the inspections they held every Thursday. You weren’t allowed to let the grass grow on the sidewalks, through the cracks, or you’d get written up. From walking around the neighborhood, I kept track of which folks cut their grass and which ones paid someone to do it.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t the only kid on the base with this brilliant idea, which meant I would have to stand out from everyone else. So each Wednesday afternoon, on my way to knock on people’s doors, I rehearsed precisely what I was going to say.

  I didn’t make a fortune—10 bucks a lawn—but I could usually finish in a half-hour or so and get to five houses before it got dark. That was 50 bucks, an honest day’s work, which was enough to buy candy a
nd other goodies at the store.

  Prior to South Carolina, in the States or abroad, my siblings and I went to the schools on the base, where there were basketball courts, tennis courts, and plenty of other amenities. You almost felt you were on a college campus. With the Defense Department paying for everything, you would expect nothing less than spotless in the classrooms and hallways. They gave us the best of everything: the best programs, the best textbooks, and, most important, the best teachers. These teachers, well paid and highly respected, cared a lot about their students, doing whatever they could to get them ready for the challenges ahead.

  That wasn’t the situation at Ebenezer, or at Hillcrest High, a few miles down the road, where I went afterward.

  The teachers were not well paid and didn’t have anywhere near the same resources. They cared about us, although some would flunk you without giving it a second thought. I often think of what some of those kids might have done with their lives, if only someone had believed in them instead of giving up on them. That goes for a few of the coaches as well.

  Take my brother, John. He was one of the state’s top running backs his senior year, and this was, remember, the South, where football was, and always will be, a religion. His grades weren’t the best, but John was a very bright kid. Yet, instead of waiting to see if he could bring those grades up, one of the coaches spread the word that John wouldn’t graduate with his class. He had no way of knowing that. The recruiters stopped checking in on him, and my brother never did make it to college, which has changed the course of his life. For the record, he graduated on time.

  The teachers at Ebenezer had a lot to deal with, though. To this day, I’ve never heard as many four-letter words as I did from the kids in junior high, and being around the game of basketball for as long as I was, with the pushing and shoving and constant challenges to one’s manhood, I was exposed to plenty of profane language.

  Then there was the drinking and the drugs and the sex—and to think, we weren’t in high school yet, when the hormones would kick in even more. One girl in my eighth-grade class was pregnant, and yet no one appeared to think it was out of the ordinary. I suppose that says a lot about the times we were living in.

  Despite needing to adjust to a new culture, I did my best to learn as much as I could, even if some of what I learned was quite disturbing.

  Exhibit A: American History.

  In history classes I took in California, I learned about Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and other leaders from our country’s past, and I expected more of the same at Ebenezer. Instead, I learned about leaders from South Carolina’s past, men who could never be leaders to me, and a lot of black folks.

  They included John C. Calhoun, the former senator and vice president from the 1800s . . . and slave owner! No, the teachers did not tell us about that John C. Calhoun; I would discover the truth on my own later. Still, I didn’t complain to anyone at school or say a word to my parents. They had enough to deal with without me adding to their burdens.

  Far from being ashamed of the state’s racist past—and present, you could argue—the teachers glorified it, no matter how much agony the institution of slavery caused to so many, for so long. What could you expect, I suppose, from a place that kept electing Senator Strom Thurmond, a fierce opponent of integration, into his nineties? Where the Confederate flag hung from the top of the statehouse?

  Just a couple of blocks from our home, as a matter of fact, stood a large housing development known as Oakland Plantation. The actual plantation home was still intact, including the shackles hanging on the walls. It was creepy, but we were too young to fully grasp what it meant. I get chills every time I think about those shackles now. After what took place in Charlottesville in 2017, we’ve come to see how important it is to take down these symbols of oppression, wherever they might stand. Better late than never.

  Back then, for me, it wasn’t just black versus white. Some of the black people looked down on me too, and it wasn’t merely because I was the new kid. I also made the mistake of speaking the wrong way.

  “You talk like a white boy,” they kept telling me.

  White boy?

  That was something I had not heard before, and it made me upset and confused. I was speaking the way I had always spoken. I had no idea what black people were supposed to sound like. Wherever we were posted, I never thought of color in how I identified myself or those I hung around with. We served with other Americans. Not white or black Americans.

  Naturally, kids being kids, they could be incredibly insensitive at times, and because I didn’t know anyone in South Carolina and, as usual, hoped to fit in, I was susceptible to any criticism from peers. For the first time, I began to question my very being: Was there something wrong with me? Should I be like them?

  Speaking in a different way wasn’t my only crime. So was having the nerve to be friends with white boys and girls, even if they happened to live right next door, which never made sense to me. Just because I played hide-and-seek with a white kid didn’t mean I was white.

  It wasn’t like that in California.

  Remember the film Stand by Me, starring River Phoenix and Corey Feldman, with the classic Ben E. King song from the early 1960s playing in the background? The boys I knew at Edwards, black and white, were just like those boys in the film.

  We camped out in one another’s backyards; went fishing in the streams; played pool, ping-pong, and video games in the rec center at the base; and had sleepovers night after night without having to get permission from our parents. Those were wonderful times. We knew they couldn’t last forever—somebody’s dad was always being transferred—although it sure felt as if they would.

  Now I was in South Carolina, where you were supposed to stick to your own kind. Oh, you might get away with spending time with white kids in your house, or even as you waited together at the bus stop, but the moment you could be seen by the rest of the kids at school, you were expected to choose sides. Never was the gap more apparent than in the cafeteria at lunchtime. The whites sat with the whites, the blacks with the blacks. You’d swear it was 1958, not 1988.

  On my first day at Ebenezer, which was mostly black, I was walking by this one white kid when I heard him say, “Bo.” I kept walking. He can’t be talking to me, I thought.

  He was, and he would not be the only white kid to call me that. Over time, I became resigned to hearing it and even convinced myself it was a sign of being accepted, sort of like being called “dude.”

  How naive I was. Bo, I found out, was slang for “Boy.” In my opinion, that is almost as degrading as the n-word, and it didn’t make any difference that the blacks, as well as the whites, began to call me Bo. Because as much as some blacks might see it as an endearing way to address one another, the connotation of the word, said by a master to his slave, makes it too offensive to ever be used. I mentioned it to my father, who told me some guy at the base also called him Bo. It provided some comfort, I suppose, that I wasn’t the only one.

  No matter. Bo it was, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. What was in my control was whether I would choose the black kids or the white kids when the bus pulled up each morning to the front door of Ebenezer.

  I chose a third option: basketball. And whoever showed up to play with me—they could’ve been yellow or green, for all I cared—that’s who I’d be friends with.

  I first fell in love with basketball when I was eight years old and we were living in Saxmundham, a town near Bentwaters Royal Air Force Base in England.

  My parents played on semipro teams in the area that did quite well. Dad could shoot it from anywhere, with his left or right hand, while Mom, I kid you not, went by the nickname of “Truck.” She was like a bulldozer the way she ran over people, and she never hesitated to throw an elbow or two. Mom, whose real name was Flora—everyone called her Flo—could score and rebound. I played for a few teams later on that could have used her.

  While people in the crowd were cheering
them on, my attention was spent looking underneath the stands for change that might have fallen from anybody’s pockets. You’d be surprised how much I could collect in a couple of hours.

  After one game, however, with my parents in the locker room and no one else around, I picked up a basketball for the first time and took a few shots. Then—and I don’t know what compelled me—I came up with a drill: three layups from the left side of the basket with my left hand, and three from the right side with my right hand. To complete the drill successfully, I had to make six layups without a miss. Nothing to it, I figured. Mom and Dad made shooting layups look easy.

  Not for me, I failed.

  I did what I usually did when events didn’t go my way. I started to cry. I could not understand why I didn’t make every shot. Not once did I consider that the baskets were 10 feet high and I was around half that size.

  I didn’t pick up a ball again our entire time in England, though it had nothing to do with the missed layups. I was busy with other activities, and there was no playground or court close to our apartment. Not until about two years later did I give the game another chance. I joined a league at Edwards for sixth- and seventh-graders, and it wasn’t long before I figured out I was pretty good. Whenever I threw the ball in the vicinity of the hoop, more often than not it went in.

  My form was not a sight to behold. I would cross my arms, tuck the ball under my chin, and let it go with two hands, all while jumping toward the basket. Yikes. How the ball ever dropped through the net is beyond me. Jeff Lensch, one of my coaches, took on the challenge of correcting these flaws. Brave man. He shot video of me, and watching the footage helped immensely. His advice was simple:

  Jump straight up. Bring your elbows in. Put one hand under the ball, the other on the side. Point your toes at the basket. Bend your knees. And keep your eyes on the rim the whole time.

  Jeff took me to my first NBA game. It was in March 1987, and the Los Angeles Lakers were hosting the Detroit Pistons at the Fabulous Forum, as it was known.