The Big Fight Read online

  Daddy battled for everything he wanted in life, including his beloved Getha, and didn’t care who might be in his way.

  He met Getha in 1948 in the town of Gapway, South Carolina, about two hours from Columbia, when he went to pick up his cousin Robert, who had just gone on his first date with the young beauty. On the way home, Robert couldn’t stop raving about Getha and how he planned to marry her one day. Pops, also now smitten, envisioned a different future and figured he might as well stake his own claim right away.

  “I’m going to take that girl from you,” he told Robert.

  “No, you ain’t,” Robert said.

  They proceeded to do what any two mature young men would if they couldn’t settle an argument. They fought. Without providing a blow-byblow account, let’s just say Robert never dated Getha again. Which didn’t mean Daddy was going to win her over without another fight, and this one would be much tougher.

  According to the rules established by Getha’s mother, Nettie Elliott, boys were permitted to pay a visit only on Wednesday and Sunday nights from six to nine. At nine P.M. sharp, your ass was out the door, one way or the other. When Cicero asked Getha if he could stop by one Sunday evening, she approached her mom for permission.

  “I reckon so,” Nettie said.

  When it came to Grandma Nettie and her daughter’s love life, that was about as much enthusiasm as she could muster, and with good reason. Getha had given birth to a son, Roy, about a year before with a man who was no longer around. Nettie and her husband took on the responsibility of raising Roy until years later, when he came up north to live with us in 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.

  “Do 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 hour away in northern Virginia.

  Pops didn’t have a choice. Good jobs for black men were not in abundance. He and Momma were struggling to feed six children and couldn’t afford to alienate anybody. The boss men weren’t cruel to my dad, although they didn’t hesitate to put him in his place.

  “Your son is too small,” they said years later, after I began to attain a little success as an amateur boxer in the Washington region. “He will never be anything.”

  “He will,” insisted Pops. “He will. You just wait.”

  They laughed.

  When I became rich and famous, they stopped laughing.

  “Do you think your son might want to buy the store?” one of the owners asked.

  “No,” Daddy said. “Not a chance.”

  He told me one of the most satisfying moments he ever experienced was when he walked into S&R for the first time as a customer instead of as an employee after I made it possible for him to retire. He was as proud as a father could be.

  The feeling was mutual, even if I was slow to come around. I will never forget the day I saw Momma holding Daddy’s unsteady hand, showing him how to write his name, one letter at a time. My father, my hero, could not write his own name. Eventually, though, I grew to have a deep appreciation for the sacrifices he made and how tough it must have been to survive in the world without a decent education. Yet he never felt pity for himself or allowed anyone to feel pity for him.

  Palmer Park, a community of similiar one-story structures, was not the most dangerous place, although we did have our share of drug dealers and troublemakers, many of whom hung out at the Landover Mall, a couple of miles from my house. My friends and I tried to keep our distance from them but didn’t always succeed. One afternoon, several of us were hanging out near the front entrance to the Palmer Park Recreation Center when we stumbled upon an argument between a thug in the neighborhood and a fat, mentally challenged kid. The guy suddenly took a wrench and pounded the kid’s head over and over. The blood gushed out the way you see it in the movies. He didn’t care that we were watching. He knew we weren’t going to call the cops or help the kid, or we’d have the rest of his friends coming after us.

  Violence was nothing new to me. I saw it in my home as well, whenever my dad taught my brothers a lesson for acting up, which was quite often, though it didn’t keep them in line for very long. His methods of discipline included an extension cord and making us bend down and put our heads between his legs while he hit us with his belt. As a shy kid who mostly stayed out of trouble, I wasn’t punished nearly as frequently as my brothers. Yet as much as I detested the violence, I was drawn to it. I admired the power and control held by those who resorted to it.

  Worse than the cord or the belt was the stare D
addy gave us whenever we let him down.

  The time I remember too well was when he bought some battery-operated race cars for me as a special present. I pestered him every day for weeks, not giving any consideration to how much they might cost for a family squeezing by from paycheck to paycheck. Sick of my nagging, he went to a jar and poured out a large pile of silver dollars. He was as excited to buy the cars as I was to play with them. The fascination didn’t last, however, because by the end of the next day, after breaking the tracks, I left the cars scattered throughout the living room as I went to play outside. Daddy did not say a word. He gave me that familiar stare and walked off. I can still see the disappointment on his face and it makes me feel horrible all over again.

  Money worries were a constant throughout my childhood. I wore my brothers’ hand-me-down clothes and stayed home from school when my class went on field trips to the famous landmarks in D.C. The lack of any savings also prevented me from becoming a member of the local Boy Scout troop. But I wasn’t to be denied. I went to the Goodwill shop and purchased an official uniform for fifty cents, a rather significant amount for a kid my age. For weeks, I wore the uniform everywhere, beaming with pride. Pretending was better than nothing. We felt the impact of our situation most acutely during the holidays with the absence of any expensive gifts under the tree.

  On one particularly grim Christmas, we received only the apples and oranges Daddy managed to pry away from the S&R stockroom. We didn’t complain. We were grateful for anything, understanding that, as African Americans in a white-dominated culture, we were different.

  It was not until one hot summer afternoon, when I was eight or nine years old, that I realized how different.

  I was walking with several friends to the Washington Monument a few miles away when we pulled up to a bar on the city’s predominantly white northwest side. The others stayed outside in the shade while I went in to ask for a glass of water.

  “Get the fuck out of here, nigger,” the bartender said.

  I wasn’t naïve. I knew what the N word meant, but it had come up only in casual conversation with other kids in the hood when we chatted about how the “honkies” took advantage of black folks. Now, for the first time, I heard the word from the lips of a white man.

  For some reason, I didn’t tell my friends, but when I got home that night I could not wait to share the experience with my parents. They would surely sit me down and explain the long, painful history of racial prejudice in the United States, and how I should cope with similar insults in the future. No explanation, though, came then or ever. Momma shrugged the incident off. She and Daddy believed, as many blacks did who grew up back then, that “if you’re white you’re right, if you’re black step back.”

  In her defense, I am certain she was merely trying to protect me from the suffering her generation endured. Still, I’ve always wished she and my father could have spoken about their anguish. We were living in the America of the mid-1960s and, despite the inspiring words from Dr. King and the courage of the marchers, black and white, who placed their lives on the line in the Deep South, our less-than-perfect country was not going to be less divisive anytime soon.

  My parents, however, had no trouble confronting each other.

  Week after week, they fought, and it normally started after one, or both, had been drinking, and often quite heavily. Nothing was as terrifying as the transformation Momma went through after she had a few drinks. She never drank in front of the children. Instead, she would disappear into her bedroom as the strong leader we depended on and come out an hour or two later angry with the whole world. There was no telling what Momma might say or do, and who might get hurt.

  For years, I told myself lies, that my parents fought about money, the root of the conflict between many marriages, black and white. Only in recent years, freed from my own indulgences in alcohol and drugs, and owning up, at last, to the pain I caused my wife and two children from my first marriage, have I been able to examine the full, ugly truth: The fights between my mom and dad were about other women. My dad couldn’t get enough of them.

  I began to remember scenes from my childhood that I had long buried, of catching him in town with a woman I did not recognize. And I was not the only witness; Daddy did not try to keep these affairs a secret. It was almost as if he wanted Momma to find out or didn’t care. The worst part, and I know I will seem racist, was that some of the women he fooled around with were white. Adultery is adultery: What difference should it make what color they were? Plenty, I felt at the time. By dating white women, he was not only hurting Momma and the family; he was altering my whole perception of race relations. I had grown up believing black men dated only black women and now I didn’t know what to think.

  The pushing and shoving between my parents was intense, with Momma the more aggressive one, tossing pots and pans. For a Godfearing, devout member of the church choir, Getha Leonard was one tough lady. People assume that I inherited my fighting spirit from my dad. It actually came from her. I have never met anyone with more determination, and that includes Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, and Marvin Hagler.

  As a kid, I felt that it was my responsibility to keep my parents from killing each other. I often threw my scrawny little body between them, as a ref does, to break them up. Daddy at least knew enough to never hit Momma back.

  In calmer moments, he showed her how to use a switchblade. The lessons did not go to waste. When Momma was eight months pregnant with me, according to my brother Kenny, she was walking up the steps in front of our apartment in Wilmington when a woman from the same building, for some unknown reason, started to slap her around.

  “As long as I live, I will get you,” Momma supposedly said.

  It took only a few months. Momma saw the woman about to enter the complex one day, got her knife and went after her. The woman fell down and screamed, but survived. Momma, I was told, went back upstairs as if nothing happened. On a different occasion, she attacked another woman who kept demanding the money she owed her.

  Then there was the time she used the knife on Daddy.

  I was six or seven, and we were still living in D.C. The noise coming from the kitchen was louder than usual, but when I made it to the living room, he was already on his way out the door. With a knife in his back.

  I followed him outside as he slowly climbed the stairs to a neighbor’s apartment on the third floor.

  “Can you pull this out?” he asked. The neighbor did.

  The wounds were not severe enough for him to seek medical attention. Knowing my dad, he would have had to be on his deathbed to go to the hospital.

  He never lost control, except when he thought someone was trying to steal his wife. One day, a stranger followed Momma home from the store. She was an extremely attractive woman, with jet-black hair down to her shoulders. The man was downstairs in front of our apartment complex. Daddy grabbed the man and threw him out into the street. When he tried to hide under a car, Daddy kicked him and pulled him out. The man started running, Daddy chasing him.

  “Don’t kill him,” people shouted.

  The man was lucky Daddy listened. I saw the entire beating and came away proud of my father. I must have told the story to everyone in school the next day.

  Through the years, the two of them managed to remain together, although fresh new disputes would occasionally tear us all apart.

  The most memorable one occurred one night in the early seventies, when Momma hurriedly packed our Ford LTD around midnight to take me, my sisters Sharon and Sandy, and my two-year-old niece, Ting, to my grandmother Nettie’s home in South Carolina, while my other siblings stayed behind in Maryland with Daddy. Momma was exhausted, but determined, as only she could be, to get out of town. It wasn’t long before everyone fell asleep, including her. At around two A.M., sitting in the front seat, I was woken up by the sound of the car careening off the road, rocking back and forth, its lights flashing on one object after another, all of us screaming. Then came the crash. I don’t k
now if I was ever unconscious. The next thing I recall was seeing blood on the windshield, the steering wheel bent, and the jack from the trunk cutting right through the backseat. It was a miracle the jack didn’t stab my sisters or my niece and that we suffered only minor injuries.

  Momma, her whole lip split and looking as if it were about to peel off, took over, ordering everyone out of the car, now tipped in a ditch. She grabbed my sisters and Ting and we started walking in the dark down a dirt road, knocking on doors, scared to death. No one was home at the first place we stopped, or they didn’t bother to answer. At the next place, a nice couple let us in and an ambulance arrived to take everyone to the hospital. From there, we called Kenny, who drove Roger, my sister Bunny, and my dad in his Volkswagen to take us home. How nine of us squeezed into Kenny’s bug remains a mystery.

  The car accident, along with the fights between my parents, gave me nightmares for decades. Forty years later, I still can’t cope with any yelling and screaming, though I was unable to avoid it during my own doomed marriage. My ex-wife, Juanita, and I were no different from my mother and father.

  I hadn’t reached puberty and yet felt like I had seen enough violence to last a lifetime, from the fighting in the hood to the fighting at home. Nowhere did I feel completely safe, knowing the next sign of danger could arise anytime. The only escape was the fictional world I read about in comic books or invented in my head.