The Big Fight Read Free Page A

D.C.
    For about a month, Cicero and Getha saw each other—only on Wednesdays and Sundays, of course—and held hands, her parents in another room. Soon they announced they wanted to get married.
    â€œDo you know what you’re doing?” Grandma asked Momma. Momma said she did.
    Yet my grandfather, in vetting a possible marriage, wanted to make sure Cicero would be a strong provider for his only daughter. He went around in his road cart to the farms in the county, asking if this Cicero Leonard was a good worker. Satisfied by the responses he received, he allowed the wedding.
    For the first couple of years together, my parents stayed in South Carolina, before settling in Wilmington, North Carolina, where my dad found work on the Coca-Cola assembly line, putting bottles in crates. The move came at the perfect time. The jobs available for blacks in South Carolina in those days were mostly in farming, and Daddy figured he had spent enough time hauling tobacco. Besides, Momma was never a farm girl. The sun made her sick. Soon, the kids started to come, one after another, me being the third youngest of six, arriving on May 17, 1956. I was named after my momma’s hero, the great Ray Charles, whose hit song “I Got a Woman” reached the top of Billboard ’s R&B singles charts in 1955. A member of the church choir, she was hoping for another singer in the family.
    In 1960, packing everyone in a car borrowed from my daddy’s brother, Norwood, we moved again, to Washington, D.C. We lived with him until we found an apartment only a short distance from the Capitol. Uncle Norwood said there was a lot of work in town, and he was right, as Daddy landed a job at a wholesale grocery store, filling up the outdoor stands with fruit and potatoes. After a few years, we left the District to rent a house in nearby Seat Pleasant, Maryland. In the late sixties, we moved to Palmer Park, a racially mixed lower-class area about twenty minutes from D.C. We rented first before buying a place of our own, on Barlowe Road, for eighteen thousand dollars. Given the modest dwellings we had lived in, the house felt as spacious as the Hearst Castle, and I didn’t mind that the rooms were cramped or that I shared a bedroom with my two older brothers. Daddy worked as the night manager of S&R, a twenty-four-hour supermarket, for about one hundred dollars a week, twice what he earned at the other store. It would be the last real job he ever held.
    He worked long hours, from midnight until almost noon, and then, whatever the weather, walked the whole five miles home. Every so often, he asked for a lift, but folks always said they were headed in a different direction. I can’t imagine the humiliation he must have felt when he watched the same people drive right past him. It took years before he saved enough money to buy a car. Sundays were our favorite time, Daddy taking the family for a picnic of barbecued fried chicken and watermelon or to the beach. While we played in the water, he slept on the grass, the heavy toll of the week catching up to him.
    My mom didn’t have it any easier, working as a nurse’s assistant at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring from eleven P.M. until seven A.M. After making dinner, she caught a bus to downtown D.C., where she transferred to another bus. For seventy-five cents, which was no small change, she then took a cab from the bus station to the hospital, and another back to the station on her way home. The trip took her two hours each way.
    Daddy did everything in the store that no one else wanted to do, which included driving a large trash truck to the suburbs twice a week. On evenings when the truck was parked in front of our house, my brothers got so embarrassed they couldn’t wait for him to drive it out of sight the following morning. Every winter, he put up the Christmas lights at the home of one of S&R’s two owners, or “boss men,” as they were known, who lived an