PART I
Chapter One: Transfer of Ownership
The wind was bitter cold and the moon full. The sky was festoon with tiny twinkling jewels set against an ebony quilt. On such a night, I was delivered into the world, January 11, 1956 at 11:05 pm just for the record.
Harlem hospital was motionless except for the triage unit at the rear of the building. On the maternity ward, nurses, garbed in nightingale white smocks, began their shift. Their rubber sole shoes acted as tiny suctions threatening to fasten them to the floor. The only other sound was the whooshing of silky nylons rubbing. Mabel Sims, my mother, was resting up from the miracle of childbirth. A young nurse returns to her station having completed her rounds.
“Mark it in the book that at 12 midnight the patient in 409 is resting soundly.”
“Duly noted,” responded the head nurse, her pasty jowl jiggling in the lamplight. “You know she’s not taking the baby home.”
“Another one?” asked the young nurse. “It never ceases to amaze me how these people can make babies and then cast them aside like yesterday’s newspaper.”
The head nurse managed a dry laugh. “The woman taking the little tike home just left here,” continued the head nurse. “With all the questions she asked, you would think she just gave birth.”
The head nurse rose from her seat and reminded her subordinate to look in on the cesarean section in room 420.
“Looks like it’s going to be a quiet night. I have some hospital matters to see to. I should be back in about 20 minutes.”
Not a day old and I already had two mothers and was the subject of hospital gossip.
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“I’ll have to see some identification, Mrs. Hall,” insisted the hospital administrator.
“Here you are, Mrs. Hall,” said the paper pusher, handing Mrs. Hall’s ID back to her.
“Mr. and Mrs. Hall, it looks like all your paper work is in order. I’ll have one of the nurses bring down your son. Congratulation and I wish your new family all the best.”
“Thank you, Miss,” said Mrs. Hall appreciatively. And, that’s the way it all began. My life’s course immutably altered with the simple signing of a piece of paper, a transfer of ownership.
My new mother arrived wanting to make a good impression. From her second hand mink stole to her French bonnet, complete with veil, she exuded an air of black bourgeois. No one would have guessed that she had been a chambermaid since arriving in New York City from Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Mrs. Hall did most of the talking, while Mr. Hall stood idle, his listless expression hiding none of his reservations. If it was not for her husband’s plain trousers, slightly worn and over starched white dress shirt, fraying around the cuffs, they might have passed for a prosperous negro couple. But, not even her husband’s long face could spoil the moment. She finally had what she so long desired, a baby of her own.
Chapter Two: What’s in a Name?
“James Audie Hall,” she proudly announced, when asked the baby’s full name. While my new parents hung my first and last name on me, my middle name was not of their choosing. The mother who bore me spent a good deal of her pregnancy in the old movie palaces of Time Square.
Audie Murphy was starring in double feature. And as in all his movies, he played a Hollywood version of himself, a bona fide American hero. Perhaps, that’s every mother’s wish for their son. With a name like Audie, how could I miss? I guess she hadn’t fully dismissed the idea of keeping me or perhaps it was a parting gift, something forever between us.
Chapter Three: An Imposition
“Jenny, get up. I gotta go to work in the gawd damn morning.” Mr. Hall’s voiced echoed off a nearby wall, as he hadn’t bothered turn over. But, she was already out of bed and sliding into her tattered slippers and worn out bathrobe, where empty hoops suggested there had once been a belt.
In another minute, she was standing in the blue glow of the kitchen stove light, rocking and cooing her bundle of joy. The whistle from the kettle failed to pierce her cocoon of rapture. Instead, she stood in the cramped kitchen singing softly and grossly off key.
“…no sir, I don’t mean maybe. Yes sir, you’re my baby now.”
Mr. Hall was becoming increasing annoyed by his wife’s maternal obsession. With her home all day, money was tight. And, when he got home, the oven was as cold as a mineshaft, not that she cooked all that much to begin with. Oh, when it came to southern cuisine the woman could ‘throw down’. Its just, well, Virginia Braxton Hall couldn’t be just a housewife. She had to be more, much more.
As a child growing up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, she dreamed of one day becoming a lawyer, but her dreams were quickly dashed by her mother’s tainted perception of the South’s many “distinguished” attorneys-at-law.
“All lawyers are liars,” her mother would say. It was unfortunate because my mother would have made a helleva attorney.
“James, I could reheat dinner. Would you like something to eat?”
“What the hell do you think?” he snorted, with all the anger of a morning factory whistle. “That baby ain’t gonna let me sleep no way.”
Before she could return with the food, the phone rang. It was her father, Roscoe, known to everyone as ‘Pop’. The lethal combination of women, gambling and booze had slowly drained the life from his now frail body. By now James was sitting up and eavesdropping. From what he managed to glean from the conversation, he knew what came next.
“James, I’m sorry. ‘Pop’ is sick and I have to take him to the emergency.”
“What about your brother or that woman he runs around with?”
“James, he’s my father and he needs me. I don’t know how much time he has left in this world,” she said, rushing off to the kitchen. ‘Pop’ was Roscoe T. Braxton, a gambler, con man, womanizer, and my grandfather. Remarkably, I remember him instructing me to lift a ten dollar bill from my mother’s purse. He did so under the guise of teaching me the game of poker. I was only five at the time.
She soon returned with the plate. “The baby is sleeping, James. But, if he wakes during the night, there’s a bottle on the stove. It will only take a minute to warm it up. Oh, and the diapers are in the top drawer in his room.”
All that he could do was watch as his wife circled the room like a Texas tornado scooping up clothes as she went. In no time she was dressed and heading for the front door. Setting his plate down, he reached over and twisted the knob on the old Philips radio beside the bed.
But, not even the melodic harmony of the Platters could sooth his irritation. Over the velvet crooners, he could hear his wife uttering some last minute instructions. Then, the door sounded shut, and she was gone.
By now the neck bones, collard greens and red rice was cold. With plate in hand, he stormed back to the kitchen. He didn’t know what infuriated him more the fact that he was stuck with the baby, one that wasn’t even his, or the fact that he would had to cancel his little love tryst with one of his Harlem coquettes. Most likely it was some of both.
So, from the start, I was an imposition. An imposition to the father that sired me, an imposition to the mother who wasn’t financially able to care for a baby, and an imposition to my new daddy who was forced to cut back his philandering. Come to think about it: an imposition to a nation that welcomed another dark child like it welcomed the first timid drops of rain at a Fourth of July celebration.
But, Virginia needed me and I her. For the first three years of my life, I was the epicenter of her world. We were inseparable. She loved to dress me up and show me off.
Chapter Four: A Black Man’s Burden
“Jenny, don’t you think the boy’s going to be hot all buddled up like that?”
“I’ve been telling her, Jay,” my father agreed, testifying to the futility of his sister’s efforts to dissuade my mother.”
Decked out in a navy blue jacket, knee-high trousers, white socks, Buster Brown shoes, and a bowtie; I was quite the little Lord Fauntleroy. We were visiting Aunt Jay Lou, the older more spiteful of my father’s two bizarre sisters. Her razor-sharp tongue repulsed anyone with the misfortune of crossing her mean-spirited path. She was a self-absorbed, money-hungry woman with skin as tough as Naugahyde; definitely a strain on the eyes.
Her wing-shaped red glasses, embossed with tiny seashells, did nothing to help her crank appearance. When she spoke, she spit. And, her pinkish lips stayed moist far longer than they should have. She kept her furniture wrapped in sticky plastic. Stale cashews, which were for important company, filled the crystal bowl on the coffee table. Evidently, no one of any importance ever came to visit considering the granite-like texture of the nuts.
I cried whenever I was left alone with her. She was every small child’s nightmare. She treated that dimly lit and shabbily furnished two-bedroom flat like it was Westminster, and all who crossed her threshold like her subjects. My aunt’s beady eyes followed my mother as she left the room.
“James, I give you a lot of credit for raising another man’s mistake,” said my aunt. Then she looked over at me as I slid down from the couch. “Get back up there, boy! Didn’t your mother tell you to sit down? James, I don’t know how you put up with it.”
“The boy ain’t too much a bother, Jay,” my father answered back, while shooting me a playful wink. That was enough to send me dashing for him. Grabbing me up with his massive hands, he tossed me high into the air before bringing me gently to rest on his lap.
Repulsed by my father’s show of affection, my aunt turned her gaze elsewhere. My mother soon returned and surmised that Jay had said or done something. Seeing me nestled in her husband’s lap told her everything she needed to know. The days ahead saw my father spending more time with wife and child and less time philandering. We had become a family
