A Conversation with the Mann Read Online Free PDF Page A

you just dirty.” Bad as all that was, worse was
     when, time to time, some of the kids would give me pennies and tell me to polish up their shoes or fetch them something like
     I was their nigger. That hurt the most—getting treated like a nobody. It made me angry they didn't respect me, didn't care
     how hard I had to work to provide for me and my father. But hurt as I was, angry as I was, I wasn't so much of either that
     I didn't take their pennies. The shame, the humiliation I felt, was my own. But so was their money. Every little bit helped.
    I saved up what I didn't spend, always making very sure I had enough money to go out and buy my father a high if he was too
     strung out to do the job himself. In Harlem, highs were easy to come by. Everywhere else in the city the police might've been
     cracking down on pushers and addicts, but across 125th Street it was just coloreds getting lifted. Coloreds robbing coloreds
     to get lifted. Coloreds killing coloreds because they were lifted. So what? Coloreds? Let 'em bleed.
    Not that there's any right age for it, but I was far too young to be buying liquor and such. I brought that up to my father
     once, the fact that a kid had no business running down to a corner or dark alley and copping dope. He smacked me in the head
     so hard it made my ear bleed. We never discussed my age and his drugs again.

    S UNDAYS WERE GOOD DAYS , about the only decent time clinging to the skeleton of my childhood. Sundays were when I used to go to Grandma Mae's for
     dinner. I would make the walk of a couple of blocks around five o'clock in the evening, my father not much caring if I was
     going to see her or going to play on the third rail of the IRT line. Not caring so long as I'd remembered to leave him a bottle
     of booze or a bag of grass.
    More than a block from Mae's and already you could smell her cooking: glazed ham, apple fritters, bread fresh made and hot.
     The aromas alone would have just about floated you to her door if you didn't know the way. Sometimes it would be only me and
     Mae for dinner. Most times she would invite others from the neighborhood. Maybe a single mother who didn't have much to feed
     her kid. Maybe a widower who would otherwise be sitting alone, again, eating some of whatever out of a can. So on and so forth
     like that. If there was a soul in the neighborhood who was in need, Mae was there to provide.
    While Mae finished making dinner I would do chores for her around the apartment; clean or scrub whatever needed it. If she
     had a leg loose on a chair I'd nail it, a rusty hinge would get oiled. All the other work I did during the week was just warm-up
     for the kind of muscle I'd put into what Grandma Mae needed done. Everyone else, no matter how well meaning, just gave me
     money in exchange for my labor. Mae gave me love.
    Dinner conversation stretched for hours, Mae with endless stories about life as a girl growing up in Indiana. It was, it seemed,
     never very good and always very hard, but often filled with little pleasures: picking fresh apples from a tree while walking
     to school. Having an open field for a church because the local congregation couldn't afford building wood or the nails to
     hold it together. Learning to cook everything from corn bread to collard greens alongside her mother and grandmother. That
     was a pleasure I could taste with every forkful of what was sitting on my plate.
    And as long as the stories seemed to go on, they stopped promptly at five minutes to eight o'clock. It was right then that
     bowls of ice cream were handed out and chairs were gathered around Mae's Philco. At two minutes to eight the television was
     turned on, giving it plenty of time to warm up, and at eight o'clock it happened. For us, for almost everyone in America,
Toast of the Town
was on.
    Ed Sullivan was on the air.
    Satellite television, cable television, before all that there was only regular television. And on television there were only
     three networks.