And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since - Hardcover

Rangel, Charles B.; Wynter, Leon E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312372523 ISBN 13: 9780312372521

Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A memoir by the seventeen-term congressman describes his experiences as a high-school dropout from Harlem, life-changing service in Harlem, and efforts to advocate for social issues. 40,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles B. Rangel is an 18-term Democratic congressman representing New York's "Fightin' 15th" District (incl. Harlem and the Upper West Side). He is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Rangel is the principal author of the $5 billion Federal Empowerment Zone demonstration project to revitalize urban neighborhoods across the U.S., and in the 1980s anti-apartheid movement he led the fight in Congress to pressure U.S. corporations to divest from South Africa. He served in the U.S. Army from 1948 to 1952, and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star for service in Korea. Rangel is a frequent guest on "Meet the Press" and other TV programs.

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And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since

1

My Beginnings Family Roots Through Junior High School

My family hails from miscegenated roots in Accomac, the seat of Accomack County, Virginia, on the rural DelMarVa peninsula. If the peninsula is a stubby thumb of land sticking 180 miles straight down the coast, right below the point where the borders of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania meet, then Accomac is smack in the middle of its overgrown fingernail, the last 75 miles that encloses the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. By the map, Accomac is just 180 miles from the U.S. Capitol, but by road, history, and economics, it's much closer to Richmond, the ex-capital of the Confederacy.

Then as now, the wealth of Accomack County comes from the land and the accumulated labor of African-Americans since slavery times. The tiny county raised 5 percent of all Virginia's chickens and grew almost half of Virginia's cash vegetable, corn, and melon crop in 1992. The 2000 census also said it was 32 percent black, 63 percent white, and just under one percent any kind of mixture. But everybody knows the numbers don't tell the real story.

Accomac, Virginia, was a very strange place. It had a lot of relationships that were a lot stronger than anything you could get by getting married or in court. They had a lot of respect for people who simply had children and took care of them, whether they were married or not. And, from slavery times, a lot of those children were fathered by white landowners on black women. I think that attitude made it easier for everyone to live together, separate and, of course, unequal, bound to the same isolated piece of land, without a great need to ask a whole lot of questions about who was what to whom.

In Accomac everybody was related to one another. My great-grandfather Frazer Wharton, who the pictures indicate I favor the most, had a white father. Frazer had his first child, my grandfather, by his first wife, Mary Dye, around 1893. Then he married another lady and had fourteenchildren. I'm not sure how Frazer managed to get all this land in Accomac, but I assume it came from the white Wharton clan that gave him his name. Except for a couple of uncles of mine who later passed for white, I still don't know much about the white Whartons. I grew up assuming that my grandfather was a scion of a proud black landholding gentry. Oh, was my mother proud of being a Wharton, hot damn! "Blanche Mary Wharton Rangel," she'd reply when formally asked her name.

As a child, from the time I was seven to about age fifteen, the family would have me and my sister down there for the summers. They called it Whartonville, because the Whartons ran everything. I remember the farm people who would come into town and get drunk, and Frazer Wharton would get them out of jail. It was another world, the rural Deep South in the late depression years, or maybe two worlds away from Harlem. In Harlem, fruits and vegetables came to you, rolling by your house on a paved road, on a cart pushed by some European immigrant shouting in a foreign accent. In Accomac, you went down dirt roads to get your food from the land, with no whites of any kind in sight.

In Harlem there were corner bars and rent parties and dance halls for celebrating the end of the workweek, or to get away from having no work at all. In Accomac there were county fairs. Oh, those fairs! It was just like in the movies--think Giant with Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson, or, better still, the movie version of the musical State Fair. Except everything and everybody was black. Oh, the pies, the crabs, and the corn--all that food and entertainment and all the drinking! I'd go there with my granduncle George, who liked to squire his little nephew from the big city around town. He was really the bad boy of the whole clan. He ran a little social spot in town, a kind of cross between what we called a candy store in Harlem and a nightclub. And he drank a lot of liquor. He'd get drunk at the fair and then forget where he left me. You know, something about drinking and then misplacing your kids must run in my family, because years later my uncle Herbert would sometimes do the same thing to me up in New York.

In Accomac it seemed as if everyone but Uncle George worked the fields. When my sister and I were down there, everyone got up at five o'clock in the morning. If we wanted to eat with them, we had better be up early, too. Actually, they'd leave a cold ham on the table, maybe some fried apples in the frying pan. But then everyone hit the fields, and they worked hard. They took it very seriously, and they had us out there taking it seriously, too. I remember how we weren't supposed to eat any of the strawberries we were picking. They'd get angry with you if you were talking or fooling around, and they'd raise hell. Of course, once the daywas over, and we'd come back in out of that sun, they'd love us to death. But when they were working, they didn't give a damn where you were visiting from; if you were there and you were eating, you worked hard in the fields.

If only for that reason, I made sure I spent my time hanging with Uncle George.

Uncle George used to visit a lot of people at night, and leave me in the car. One time I ran the damn car into a tree while I was waiting. But he was so bad, he just said, "Forget about it." He didn't give a care about nothing. Uncle George! He had this place--I guess you'd call it a roadhouse--that served hot dogs and beer but no hard liquor. They had music going, and people would come, buy their cigarettes and soft drinks, and socialize. I don't recall thinking much about it at the time, but it must have felt a whole lot like the action on a Harlem street corner, and that was damn sure more my speed than picking produce.

And Uncle George thought my coming from Harlem made me something special, gave me what we now call street smarts. And then I caught some guys stealing money from him one time, and that did it. He fired the guys, and bragged about how it took a kid from Harlem to get these thieving sons of bitches out of his business.

So these are my grandfather's roots, but he didn't like the farm life that Accomac offered him. His name was Charlie Wharton, and I guess he could have stayed and staked a claim to some of that land. But one day when he was sixteen, he reached down, picked up a good handful of that dirt, and let it crumble through his hand. Then he looked up at his father and said he didn't want any part of it. That's the story he told me about getting out of Accomac, over and over through the decades. He basically went a couple hundred miles up the coast, to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and found work as a waiter. Later on he met this pretty gal, Frances, my grandmother, whom I never knew. She was from Savannah, Georgia. He brought her to New York, and had two children--my mother and her older brother, Herbert. They were living someplace in Hell's Kitchen, because that's where the blacks were at that time, before they started moving up, and uptown. My uncle was born in 1902, my mother in 1904. When my mother was two years old my grandmother died giving birth to a third child, who didn't survive. About 1923 my grandfather left Hell's Kitchen and moved to 132nd Street, where he bought a brownstone.

Now, for the longest time he would have me believe that he didn't have access to any money to afford to buy that house, but his father, Frazer, came up to New York and signed a note for him. My grandfather put a down payment on the house, and he had to pay off that note.These are stories my grandfather told me in the kitchen, when he'd be drinking. Often, from down in his cups, he would go on about all he had done for my mother and my uncle Herbert, and how neither one of them appreciated it.

My grandfather would never...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312372523
• ISBN 13: 9780312372521
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar