six• Vapors and Black Ink

I drove the Grapevine highway straight back toward the Bay Area, making as few pit stops as humanly possible traveling in the company of a six-yearold boy and a baby girl.

We hoped to lie low while I obtained an apartment and a job. My mother agreed to let Darolyn and me squeeze into her place, which already was housing enough relatives to remind me of D Soloman’s Alley. My old best friend, Rose Mary, offered to take Steven in for a while—an act of bravery considering she had no experience whatsoever with small children. Nor did Steven make it easy for her, considering that he somehow managed to crawl out of a tiny upstairs window and onto her roof, necessitating a Fire Department rescue.

Returning to my mother’s home one night, I observed a car parked across the street and the glow of a cigarette from the driver’s side. Mother, watching anxiously out the window, saw me rushing up the steps; and she quickly opened the door and closed it behind me. She continued to watch from the corner of the window in the darkened room. I sat on the sofa in silence, trying not to panic. Finally, she saw the glow of the cigarette extinguished, the headlights switch on, and the car pull slowly away. Now Frank knew where I was. I had to move, and move quickly.

The next day I accepted an apartment in South Berkeley near where my mother and mother-in-law lived. Race and money dictated that I stay near those who knew me; intuition told me that sooner or later, Frank would find me.

I was right. Shortly after our furniture arrived from storage, the children and I returned to our apartment past dusk. Shifting Darolyn on my hip, I entered the bedroom, and my heart stopped: a dark figure was rising from beneath the bed. Time froze. I couldn’t scream. Did the shadow have a knife? A gun?

And then I heard that sarcastic voice say, “Belvagene. So, you thought you could get away.”

In the split second between caution and terror, I flipped on the light.

The baby squirmed, and I instantly decided that an offense was my best defense.

“What are you doing in my house?” I shouted. Darolyn began to cry. Steven burst over the threshold and ran to his father. I snapped out questions with the rapid fury of a Gatling gun: “Why were you under my bed? How did you get in here? What gives you the right? Get out of my house!”

Taken aback, Frank actually began to apologize for frightening us so. He told Steven he had missed him and would see him again soon, and then he agreed to leave. But I knew we would never have another peaceful night in that apartment, so we moved again—this time to a second-floor three-bedroom apartment with only one door—and I took another African American woman who held a civil service job as a roommate.

But the smartest thing I did was hire UC Berkeley nursing student Karen Lind as a part-time live-in babysitter. Karen was so tenderhearted that she had adopted a Korean orphan from one of those television appeals. She fell in love with my children, and on weekends often would take Darolyn to her home in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. Unbeknownst to me, she was taunted by strangers who mistakenly presumed the black baby was hers.

Meanwhile, Frank wasn’t finished with me yet. I was served with legal papers accusing me of child neglect and of being an unfit mother. Frank and his mother were seeking custody of both of my children. Somehow I didn’t blame my mother-in-law; they were her only grandchildren. But he knew better.

Granted, I had vulnerabilities he could exploit: the manner in which I left him could be portrayed as unfair and erratic, and I was subsisting on a string of jobs through a temp agency plus my stint as “Society Swirl” columnist for the Bay Area Independent. But after I enlisted the services of Carl Metoyer, a black lawyer who was the epitome of respectability, the case was dropped before it even went to trial. Only many years later would I discover a possible explanation for Frank’s surrender: in the final months of our mar riage, he had been carrying on a surreptitious affair, fathering a child born about the same time as Darolyn.

Declaring myself an independent woman was a costly endeavor, but at last I had my freedom. I just had to figure out how to earn enough money to keep the children and me afloat, given that I had forfeited to Frank my share of our house on Seneca and had not fought for or received any child support. Occasionally he sent them a twenty-five-dollar savings bond, but that was it.

So I became a wizard at living on vapor—a word I preferred over handout. I never asked anyone for help, especially my parents; but somehow help materialized at pivotal moments. One example was my friend Lillian Fortier, who was raising five children and pursuing her dream of a career in public relations. She rented a house near our apartment, and she had a small garden in back that produced an overabundance of tomatoes that she shared with me—a valuable vapor. One particularly memorable week, we had tomatoes every day: fried tomatoes, corn bread, and Kool-Aid one night; “hot water corn bread” with tomato sauce another; crispy fried patties made from corn meal, flour, tomatoes, and pinches of sugar and salt yet another. I imagined these were old slave recipes and that by fixing them I was establishing a communal connection to ancestors. My children, just plain hungry, were under no such delusion. Our week culminated in a meal of spaghetti and tomato sauce. Steven let me know he was well aware that the hamburger meat that belonged in the sauce was inexplicably missing.

Our household celebrated on the day Don Welcher, the publisher of the Bay Area Independent, offered me a full-time job. I had no set hours, only a requirement to work as much as necessary to get the paper out. My salary was forty dollars a week—scarcely sufficient to cover rent and childcare—but I was delirious with joy.

My mind flashed back to my high school years in Berkeley, when every Saturday morning I would journey down to Rumford’s drugstore in search of news from the nation’s leading African American broadsheets. Proprietor and pharmacist William Byron Rumford became Northern California’s first black legislator, eventually winning passage of landmark laws outlawing discrimination in employment and housing throughout California. At Rumford’s I would buy Uncle Ezra the newest editions of the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier; and I’d help him read them. Now I was going to be a real reporter, too.

The Independent was one of two black weeklies then operating out of San Francisco’s Fillmore District, a black cultural mecca with a thriving commercial core studded with cafés, hair salons, jazz clubs, shops, and churches. Southern blacks had moved into the area during the war; they often occupied the homes of Japanese residents ordered into internment camps, and the blacks had found steady work in the shipyards and other military facilities. Now the jobs were gone and the people poor, but the vibrancy lingered; the cool syncopation of jazz and blues still punctuated the night air; and the savory tastes of home cooking—gumbo, fried chicken, candied yams, greens, and corn bread—continued to lure people to the pulsing Fillmore.

As the Independent’s publisher, Welcher was a capitalist through and through, a black Republican who strove for objectivity and wanted his newspaper to play it straight while turning a profit. He had little interest in writing editorials, preferring to spend his time persuading local merchants that they should invest their ad dollars with us. The Independent was by far the smaller of the two publications.

The other, the Sun-Reporter, was its opposite—a fiery crusader owned by the legendary Dr. Carlton Goodlett, a black physician with socialist sympathies who claimed, “A people who fails to control or have access to the media... is a psychologically enslaved and deprived people. As crucial to democracy as the concept of ‘one man, one vote’ is the concept of ‘one man, one voice.’”

Both papers filled the void that existed in local coverage of so-called Negro news. Despite the fact that the Bay Area’s black population had soared in the post-war era, major white papers largely ignored the community as transient and unworthy of attention. Tom Fleming, the Sun-Reporter’s editor, recalled that after a press conference in the late 1940s, then San Francisco mayor Roger Lapham cornered him and asked, “Mr. Fleming, how long do you think these colored people are going to be here?” Fleming looked him in the eye and replied, “Mr. Mayor, do you know how permanent the Golden Gate is? Well, the black population is just as permanent. They’re here to stay, and the city fathers may as well make up their minds to find housing and employment for them, because they’re not going back down South.” According to Fleming, Lapham turned red in the face and never spoke to him again.

By 1961, the Sun-Reporter had a zealous following. Its motto was “That no good cause shall lack a champion, and that evil shall not thrive unopposed.” To those ends, the paper vigorously advocated desegregation, fair employment, housing laws, and new requirements that San Francisco’s Muni hire blacks. Goodlett liked to say he wrote editorials to “spank the butts” of the powers that be. None of us imagined then that four decades in the future, the street address of San Francisco City Hall would be renamed Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.

At the Independent, we could only hope for a fraction of the Sun-Reporter’s influence, not to mention its advertising base or news staff. In fact, we had the distinct disadvantage of having a newsroom staff of merely two: my editor and me. And to complicate the issue even further, he was white, with a Southern drawl to boot.

His name was Darryl Lewis. He had spent years as an Asian bureau chief for the Associated Press, but he hit the liquor bottle one too many times and blew one too many deadlines to keep his job or find another in the mainstream press.

“I’ll be honest with you—you’re going to have to give Darryl a lot of help, and you’re going to have to defend him, too,” Welcher said the day he offered me the job. “He’s experienced and he knows journalism. But he doesn’t know the Negro community, he doesn’t know the Bay Area, he doesn’t even know America that well—the man’s been out of the country for years. Our people aren’t gonna want to talk to him. But Belva, they’ll talk to you.”

That was the literal truth, more than Welcher could have imagined. One day Darryl and I were both working in the back room of the Independent’s rickety building on Turk Street when we heard the bell jingle on the door to let us know someone was entering the office. Darryl strolled up front to handle the situation, and before long he called out for me.

“Belva, could you come up front?”

“Just a minute,” I called back, intending to finish up what I was doing.

“No, right away, please,” he insisted.

Grumbling silently about the interruption, I approached the front and saw three clean-shaven men, standing ramrod straight, all dressed in somber suits, crisp white shirts, and bow ties. One of them was a dead ringer for Malcolm X.

“Good afternoon, sister,” said one of his lieutenants.

Uncertain about Black Muslim protocol, I simply said, “Good afternoon.”

There was an awkward silence. Darryl glanced at me and ventured an explanation: “These gentlemen want to place something in the paper.”

I stared back at him blankly. Fine, I thought, so why do you need me?

One of the lieutenants provided the missing information: “Brother Malcolm don’t talk to white folks.”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “But don’t you guys have your own newspaper?”

Of course they did. Black Muslims in the early 1960s could often be found on urban street corners, hawking copies of their new publication, Muhammad Speaks. It debuted in 1961 with a cover title “Some of this Earth to Call Our Own or Else.” The Nation of Islam—founded in Detroit in the 1930s and led in the early 1960s by Elijah Muhammad—preached pure living, black brotherhood, and racial separatism. At the time, Malcolm X was one of Elijah Muhammad’s key disciples and was functioning as the public face of the faith. Although he would later break with the Nation of Islam and espouse a more unifying message, at the time he had unnerved whites by labeling them “devils” and troubled many blacks by labeling civil rights leaders, including Dr. King, as “stooges” and “chumps.”

And there he stood, only a few feet away from me, with a gaze so intense I felt as though his eyes were lasers piercing right through me.

“Sister, we have some information here that we want to give to our black brothers who might miss our paper.” He went on to add that he would like his text to be printed unedited, at its full length, and at no charge.

I pivoted to face Darryl, addressing him as though he didn’t understand English: “Brother Malcolm would like his text to be printed unedited, at its full length, and at no charge.”

Darryl responded that we could run the copy and do so for free—let’s face it, neither of us wanted to cross the Black Muslims—but the next edition simply had no room left to fit it in without trimming his text.

Again, I turned to Malcolm X and relayed Darryl’s comments as though they had been nothing but incoherent gibberish to his ears.

Darryl: “Perhaps I could split it and run it in two editions?”

Me: “Perhaps he could split it and run it in two editions?”

Malcolm X: “No, I want it all to run at one time.”

Me: “No, he wants it all to run at one time.”

This farce continued back and forth while Darryl and Malcolm X negotiated a solution to the snag, with me “translating” every verbal volley in their exchange. At last they agreed that Malcolm X himself would do the cutting, and everyone waited as he took out a pen and excised the few paragraphs he deemed most expendable. Then he handed the copy over to me, and the trio strode briskly out.

For the rest of my life, I would always wonder whether this demand for a “translator” was ordinary behavior for Malcolm X, or if he was having a bit of fun at Darryl’s expense.

At the Independent I learned to write compelling leads, craft snappy headlines, pick up the Safeway supermarket ads that kept the paper going, deliver copy to the printer, file tear sheets, retrieve the first run of the paper for distribution, and sober up Darryl on his bad days. In short, I got a real education in publishing a small paper.

Darryl, a small man with brown wavy hair and blue eyes who walked with a slight limp, brought a global perspective to his coverage of racial affairs in the early 1960s. He believed that people of color all over the world bore similar burdens and shared a very rich history, and he encouraged me to follow world events so we could discuss their implications. During his sober spells, I couldn’t have had a better teacher. He put me at ease about my lack of a college education—telling me to just write accurately about what happened and capture the emotions of the people I interviewed as well as I could. These people were the story; I was merely their messenger. He imparted a wonderful way to learn.

Best of all, he corrected my spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Suffice it to say that my spelling and syntax skills would someday make me a natural at broadcasting.

Never did we lack news to cover. San Francisco’s Geary Street Expressway was ripping the neighborhood apart: Its dividing line between north and south, rich and poor still stands. James Baldwin swept into town to promote his literary manifesto, The Fire Next Time, and I interviewed him over at Mary Ann Pollard’s intellectual private club, the Rainbow Sign, in Berkeley. But the greatest thrill was the day Cassius Clay came to town.

Clay was on a winning streak in the ring, but he was not quite yet the world heavyweight boxing champ he would become in 1964, much less the “Sportsman of the Century” that Sports Illustrated would crown him in 1999, after he had assumed the name Muhammad Ali. He had won the light heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics and left Europe a hero, although he claimed that after returning home he was refused service at a “whites-only” restaurant and was harassed by a white gang—experiences that prompted him to disgustedly toss his medal into the Ohio River.

In any event, he came to the Fillmore one sunny afternoon to soak up the adoration that surely awaited him. I was on hand with photographer Chuck Willis to cover his visit for the Independent as well as Jet; although my babysitter arrangements had fallen through, so I had both Steven and Darolyn in tow. The boxer with the strikingly handsome face entertained his way down the thoroughfare, loving the backslaps, the blown kisses, and the jive talk as he led a pied piper’s parade through the establishments along the Fillmore.

It took us hours to travel a few blocks. Beauty shop patrons with their hair in various stages of washing, pressing, and curling squealed and ducked under their salon capes. The men tried to play it cool—the shy ones flashing him smiles accentuated by gold-capped teeth, the braver ones slapping his hand in congratulations. I was urging Steven along, carrying Darolyn, and frantically scribbling notes on my pad when Clay asked me why I wasn’t home taking care of my children. Then with a crinkly smile he said, “Gimme that child,” and scooped Darolyn up and onto his shoulders. She was delighted and was content to remain up there in the limelight for the rest of the afternoon. The most disappointed person of the day was Steven. He, too, wanted to be carried by this icon, but he begged to no avail. Clay said, “You’re a big boy. Come on. Stop crying. Act like a man.” Although Steven had heard these words from his father, it pained him more to hear them from the one and only Cassius Clay.

Chuck supplied pictures to Jet and the Independent, and we published a major spread that was one of our most popular editions, selling out at newsstands throughout the city.

Still the Independent struggled financially and grew increasingly out of step with the rising liberalism of the Bay Area. One day Darryl didn’t show up for work and never came back. I got the chance to move to the more influential Sun-Reporter and never looked back.

My column at Sun-Reporter became more political. One story I relayed was about black businessmen who had attempted to dine at Trader Vic’s shortly after the eatery was required to remove its No Niggers Served sign, only to have the waiter smash the men’s glasses on the floor. I covered controversial W. E. B. Du Bois—who, as the first African American to graduate from Harvard, fought for civil rights and, at the age of 93, joined the Communist Party USA—when he spoke at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church.

But in addition to my column, I also was the Sun-Reporter’s women’s editor. Dr. Goodlett decided that my duties included going to tony clothing stores, such as Macy’s and City of Paris, and persuading them to use black women as models in their ads. I saw this as a crusade for the dignity and pride of dark-skinned women, although in retrospect I’m sure he was mindful of the advertising potential, too. I recall telling him that I had secured a commitment from Macy’s to use black models and run ads in our paper if we followed Macy’s suggestion that the Sun-Reporter hire a fashion editor. He readily agreed; then he added, “So, I guess you’ll just have to share your salary.”

I knew then that my time at the Sun-Reporter would come to an end—no way could I live off a reduced paycheck—but I had made a crucial connection with the paper’s political editor, Edith Austin. Heavy, dark, her hair in a “natural” that looked as wild as a revolutionary’s, Edith blew into rooms like a hurricane—a concentration of force and mass to be reckoned with. She wrapped herself in long ethnic garbs, refused to take any lip off anyone; and she could take the top Democratic politicos of the day, wrap them around her pinkie, and kick ’em on the way out the door. She knew a lot of things that a lot of people didn’t want known, and she knew how to leverage that power for maximum effect. I knew I never, ever wanted to make her mad.

Most Sunday mornings, Edith hosted her salons, where up-and-coming black politicians such as future Berkeley congressman Ron Dellums would gather for grits, eggs, biscuits, and strategizing. The attendees would crowd into her Telegraph Avenue apartment in Berkeley, filling the available sitting space on the furniture and floor. She called them her “main horses,” and all were men except Edith and me. I was the only woman invited, and I understood from the outset that I wasn’t there to speak but to listen—listen and learn.

Just as I was beginning to understand the newspaper business, a new opportunity materialized. Herb Campbell, the lone newsman at whiteowned, black-programmed San Francisco radio station KSAN, phoned me to ask whether I’d like to read my social column on the air. The only other black woman I had ever heard do such a thing was Tarea Hall Pittman, the West Coast regional director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who in her staccato voice recorded a weekly Negroes in the News report for Oakland station KWBR. I was intrigued and immediately said yes.

I was going to be on the radio.