WHAT A LIFE!!
He goes on to tell about how he practically becomes a legend in Roxbury, (the black ghetto of Boston), when he gets picked up by this fine white woman, a blonde he calls Sophia, which was like totally forbidden in those days. She had her own car, a convertible, and her own cash. Which she was spending on him, and pretty soon, he’s parading her all over the black clubs and bars in Roxbury. All the big time hustlers and gamblers were salivating over her, and he says he felt like all eyes were on him when they were out together. And he’s still only sixteen! I know that feeling - that’s how it is when I am around Esperanza.
I fall asleep for about an hour and a half, before I have to wake up for school again and I’m only on page seventy-two - the book is four-hundred and sixty-six pages long. I can’t wait to get at it again!
For the next few days, it’s like I’m not even living my life. I’m not Joey Montaperto, in Roselle at this moment in this world anymore. Instead, I find myself cruising along on this odyssey, this journey with Malcolm X, our lives somehow oddly intertwined. Every opportunity I get to sneak away and satiate myself with this adventurous addiction, I grab it. I’m poring over every passage, sometimes three or four times, intent on slurping up each morsel of flavor, and bathing in the particular mood of those words.
He becomes known as Red, or “Detroit Red,” because of his reddish toned skin, and his bright red ‘conk’, which is what they called this process of using lye, to burn their hair straight, to make it look like a white man’s hair.
But my favorite part, no doubt, was the way he described how he got out of the draft in 1943, for WWII. The prevailing consensus among the young ghetto dudes was:
“Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.” Which of course, I totally agree with, in the first place. So I love it when he said he went down to the draft board totally bugging out, wearing his wildest zoot suit, frizzing up his red conk and talking a mile a minute with ghetto slang, like, “Crazy-o, daddy-o, get me movin’.”
He said a lot of the prospective white inductees in the draft room looked at him with that vinegary, ‘worst kind of nigger look’. Freakin’ hilarious. Anyway, he finally convinces the Army psychiatrist to 4F him, which is the rejection card for the physically/mentally incompetent, when he comes into the room all jumpy. He’s peeping under doors, and tells the guy he wants to get sent down South so he can organize the Negro soldiers, steal some guns, and kill them some ‘crackers’.
Now my admiration grows for him by the minute.
