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1. Bronx Beginnings
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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1 Bronx Beginnings To tell this story right, I have to go back to the very beginning, back to my earliest memory. The year is 1955. I am 5 years old, and I’ve just awakened alone in my bed by the window. The morning light is drifting in, and I shiver a little as I realize that my pajamas and the sheet underneath me are wet. I call for my mother. When she doesn’t respond, I crawl up toward the window sill, hoping to see her outside. Everybody seems very far away from my perch up on the 11th floor, but I can see a woman sitting on the bench talking to some people. I think she might be my mother. I cry out to her, but she stays there, talking, and does not look up. In my desperation, I stand on my tiptoes. Then I swing one leg and then the other through the open window and put my two feet on the ledge. I am sitting on the window frame, but the woman still can’t see me. The only thing keeping me from climbing out the window entirely is the fact that it is secured to the sill by a chain; it’s going to be difficult—though maybe not impossible—for me to squeeze through the narrow space. I am more than one hundred feet above the street when a strange thing happens—something that I am still not able to understand or explain fully—yet somehow the memory of it seems important, because it has stayed with me all these years. When I look to the right of me, I see the next-door apartment building with its many windows, and standing outside one of them on another window ledge is a tiny woman with long gray hair tied in a pony tail. Even from a distance, I can see that she is wearing a white apron trimmed in red. She seems to be the size of a 1 2 Bronx Beginnings baby doll, and she does not move. But I don’t see her clearly; she may be white, but she also looks like my Aunt Mary from my father’s side, who is Cherokee Indian. (Another strange fact: Aunt Mary is a woman whom I had not yet met but who will come to visit us soon after, her long gray Indian hair in a pony tail, wearing the same white apron.) Meanwhile (as the story has been retold to me many times), my mother, who left the apartment briefly, comes back to the building to find police officers and firefighters running inside. She gets into the elevator with them and, concerned, asks one of the firefighters about the location of the fire. When he informs her that there is no fire, only a child hanging out a window of one of the apartments, she freezes and asks, ‘‘Which one?’’ A police officer answers her, saying ‘‘Apartment 11F,’’ and my mother begins wailing, ‘‘That’s my baby! That’s my baby!’’ The police and firefighters try to calm my mother. When the elevator doors open, they lead her down the hall and into our apartment, warning her that any sudden movement might startle me and cause me to fall. In an act of amazing self-control, my mother slowly and calmly walks into my room with the police officer, opens her arms, and asks me to come away from the window. I pull my legs inside and stand on my bed, and she folds me in her arms. It takes a long time for her to stop crying and hugging me. She seems to think I will disappear if she lets me go. This story of my early brush with death has come back to me, over and over, in the course of my life. It was part of what defined me in my family and in my neighborhood—identified me both as a fearless risk taker and as a crazy man who often acted without assessing the consequences . Whether this is true or not I don’t know. What I do know is that this event was the first of many narrow escapes from disaster in my life, times when I put myself in life-threatening situations and somehow walked away. The story in this book tells of these encounters and, more, of promising beginnings and false starts, of mentors...