Chapter 4B

Two technicalities that didn't particularly plague me at that time were: whatever happened to Martha Jane's virginity? And what did she use for birth control?

I assumed that my early sexual equipment had not yet developed to the size required for breaking hymens. This seemed reasonable, though I did have about five inches erect in those days and from what I had seen and heard from other boys my age, I was above average in that department. At the swimming pool in the project and at Malone Pool, a municipal public swimming pool nearby, plenty of kids showed up who didn't hesitate to drop drawers in public and hop into their swim trunks. From all I saw, I was a definite contender. From Martha Jane's testimony, of course, I was the best in the business.

Birth control was a different matter. I did my own research, at considerable consternation to the librarian who fetched dozens of medical references out of the library stacks. The best information I could gather and decipher led me to conclude that it was medically possible for me to do some damage--though I doubted I'd find a urologist who would dare confirm it.

In addition to official references, I garnered more information from every young boy's ultimate source: the firsthand tales of that worldliest of peers, the local 12-year-old womanizer. I don't remember this kid's name, but he frequented the big grassy lawn that stretched before my building. It was a ritual about once a month for this nice looking, hefty redheaded kid to pontificate on the handling and seduction of young girls before a group of enthralled listeners age 4 to 14 or so. At about that time I decided to hang around for some of these sessions, during which I heard the usual rumors about virginity often passing without pain or bloodletting, or via other means (sports, et al). He had his own lurid stories to relate, and often did so with amazing clinical detail that, through my experience with Martha Jane, convinced me that at least some of his reports seemed authentic.

I decided Martha Jane's hymen had probably been taken by me-exactly when, I couldn't say--and that its inconvenience had been masked by ardor and passion.

My scouring about the world was not limited to what I could find in a boring book. I did consort with peers now and then, especially on the school playground at lunch and recess. I developed no close or frequent friends. The one buddy I did take up with was Stepper.

I spent about a year kicking around with him. He was a black boy my own age. We didn't see each other regularly because he lived on the other side of the downtown area, near my Aunt Frances' home.

I met Stepper on one of my expeditions into the downtown business district. Having been packed off to my godmother's place for a weekend, I had spent the morning sitting around their restaurant near busy Union Station. The usual procedure when I spent weekends with my godparents or my father's parents was to spend evenings in their home; but since they had no sitter for me and everyone in the family manned the business during the day, they would drag me downtown with them when they opened the Tremont Cafe in the morning. I spent half my time gobbling down ice cream and Cokes and whatever was on the menu, and the other half exploring the nearby railroad yards, playing Army games near the grounds of the mammoth post office building next door, or poring over comic books and sipping milk shakes. I had exhausted my supply of comics that day and sat around looking bored, so my godmother, my great-Aunt Frances, handed me two bucks for more comics.

Searching the newsstands nearby in Union Station and Central Station uncovered nothing new. So in my usual (i.e., unpredictable) way I wandered into the thick of downtown Memphis until I discovered a new and gigantic supply of comics in a hotel near Beale Street. In 1949 two dollars would buy a sackful of comics, and a sackful is what I held under my arm as I started back toward Aunt Frances' place.

Just beyond the corner of Beale and Main I heard a jazz band. Following the sound, I found a small crowd listening to the threepiece band on a block on Beale Street. This was an event in Memphis, there being ordinances against such things. All three players in the band were blacks, with a drummer and a bass player, and a trumpeter in a straw hat with a bright yellow feather. The fourth member was Stepper, a gangly black kid in loose clothing who was shuffling and tap dancing. The kid's style caught my eye. He seemed very smooth and adept; I had seen enough Fred Astaire flicks at the Suzore's to recognize fancy footwork.

After he performed a couple of numbers he took a big bow from the crowd and leaned against the wall of the building for a break while the band started a number without him. That's when I walked over to him and, too shy to know how to start a conversation with a person who seemed so accomplished, I shuffled around without a word until he happened to notice the corner of a comic book cover that had crept up over the edge of the paper bag I held.

"Say," he said, pointing to the bag, "you got Plastic Man in there!"

"Yeah! You know about Plastic Man?"

"Do I? My favorite. Got them funny glasses, and go stretchin' his neck all the way around buildin's an' everything. Yeah, it's funny, it's really weird artwork, the way they draw that guy."

We established an immediate rapport. I found it odd that a kid who performed with such alacrity and precision could have such a sleepy, lazy manner of speaking. There was much about Stepper that I found intriguing: he had a flair for dance and a sense for music that has never been matched by any kid I knew before or since. He had practical and apparently hard-earned "street smarts" that I envied. At the same time there was something about him that was even more childlike than his 8 or 9 years. I kept seeing him as a youngish Pied Piper.

Before I left that day I offered him my copy of Plastic Man. He thanked me but said he wouldn't have time to read it on the spot.

But I held the book out to him and said, "No, keep it. It's yours. I'll get another one."

The kid beamed a big, surprised smile at me and said thanks. He asked if I hung around there often, and I said I'd try to get back on a weekend. As I was leaving he said, "Hey, you ever get back here, look for me. Ask for Stepper. That's me."

A few weeks later I again saw Stepper dancing with the street band. When I talked with him during his break I was surprised when he reached into a wrinkled paper sack, pulled out the Plastic Man comic and handed it to me. He said he hoped it wasn't too damaged, he had given it to his smaller brother Junior. And even his 5-year-old sister Truluv had read it.

I asked, "Really? You have a sister named 'True Love'?"

"Yeah, Truluv," he said, and he spelled it for me. "That was my Aunt Harriet's idea. She got a lot o' goofy ideas."

When Stepper was finished for the day he gave me a brief tour of Beale Street, which had not changed very much since its heyday at the turn of the century. This street was "downtown" for blacks who lived in that area, although many of the businesses had since been bought out by whites.

Stepper told me his real name was Franklin, which he didn't

like. He insisted on being called by his nickname, Stepper. He was amused when I told him I had the opposite problem and that I hated my nickname. Stepper lived in a small house near Beale Street with his mother, an uncle, his sister Truluv and his baby brother Junior, and their dog Agnes. It turned out that his home was in the same neighborhood as my Aunt Frances and her next door neighbor, my Aunt Josephine Sansone. Stepper said he was familiar with those names. He told me he had an older uncle, Robert, who was a handyman and junk collector in the neighborhood. He cruised the area with his mule and wagon and made part of his living making deliveries or picking up used tires, refrigerators, sinks, or whatever refuse could be sold or rebuilt. The local shopping area had a small supermarket, a liquor store, a cleaners, and a restaurant and beer hall on the corner of Linden Street. My dad's relatives owned that property and ran the businesses. The area was a decaying part of Memphis built in the 1890's. The old two story houses that were still standing were populated by whites, many of them either closely or distantly related to me. The other side of the area was literally a shantytown populated by poor negro families who lived in houses little better than shacks.

Stepper became my indispensable guide to many of the dangers I had somehow avoided downtown. Standing on a street corner one day he pointed out a very large lady shopper who was crossing the street, walking in our direction.

"Lookit that lady," he murmured close to my ear as he pointed to her. "See, she got two shoppin' bags she's holdin' in one arm, and that other bag she got down at her left side. Lookit dem two bags she's holdin' in her right arm. See dat? It wouldn't take nothin' to bump up aside her a little bit, and dem bags come tumblin' down all over the sidewalk. You could grab three or four, maybe five things outta that bag and run like the devil, she'd wouldn't know it 'till too late to catch you."

He showed me how several shoppers left themselves vulnerable and how he could make a getaway unscathed.

I asked him how he knew these tricks.

"My brother, he 19 years old and he have this friend, name is Joel. Joel brung me down here one time and showed me all them tricks. Said he wanted me to do it with him. But I wouldn't do it."

"Have you ever done anything like that?"

"Nope. Not me. And I'm glad I didn't. 'Cause Joel, he's in the penal farm for it right now. And I'm not. But I hope I never get to the point where I have to steal like that."

"Why would you have to steal?"

"'Cause you get hungry. You don't have no home. Then you got to. Got to buy sump'n to eat. Ain't no other way."

Stepper guided me to many of the secret places in unlikely parts of the city. Like me, he was inveterately curious. We saw each other every few weeks or so and explored areas that had not been touched or seen by anyone in years. We crept through the dank, silent warehouses of the old cotton shipping district, unused at that time for dozens of years, and found remnants of an entire railroad network that connected the shipping docks. We followed the railroad itself through an old part of town, onto the bluffs along the waterfront, across the Mississippi River on the old Harriman bridge and into Arkansas on other shore. Traversing the old railroad bridge was scary: there was no walkway and only a thin metal cable for a handrail, and therefore there was no escape from oncoming trains, short of diving into the river. The heavily rusted tracks told us that the bridge had been unused for years. Still, we played it safe and walked back to town over the DeSoto Bridge, which had a pedestrian walkway.