Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Read Free Book Online Page B

she got home from work; and the third when Daddy arrived and found out what had happened.
    â€œThe neighborhood was together,” Reeves said. “There was a close feeling. You might not like it if one of those people put a strap on you for being way in the wrong, but you could count on them when you had troubles. If you got sick, everybody was trying to help you. They got together and exchanged remedies. . . . Goose grease on your chest and a flannel over it. If you got a cut on your leg, jimsonweed salve. It was yellow and it would damn near fight off gangrene.”
    Reeves didn’t recall ever seeing the Parker boys’ father, but he remembered Addie as sweet and friendly. The two sons were opposites: “I first met Charlie on Ninth and Washington Avenue. He must have been about eight. I was always butting around somewhere and I met John first, who was kind of a straggler, you know, looking for fun. . . . John was talkative and laughing. Charlie was different. He was a loner. Mostly to himself. John talked a lot but Charlie was quiet. Charlie didn’t bother much whether he got with you or not. If he was digging a hole and you was climbing trees, he kept on digging that hole. If he was climbing a tree and you were digging a hole, he wasn’t thinking about coming out of those branches. But when he wanted to, Charlie could get with us and we would do all the things that boys did back then. Just fun, but plenty of mischief, too.”
    They played mumblety-peg; they rolled hoops removed from the wheels of old wagons; they shot marbles; they rode sleds in the winter. There were railroad tracks, a box factory, and coal yards in walking distance, which allowed for playing in boxcars, climbing in the box factory’s bins, and getting filthy with coaldust. But their bib overalls were strong enough to stand up to the pressure of boys out for squealing joy.
    One of the things they liked to do was individually beg up on a few cents from a parent and go “crawdadding.” “We’d get a nickel’s worth of liver and those crawdaddies would cover it. They was good eating, too.” On Saturdays and Sundays, the kids could buy crawdads from the crawdad man, who dressed in white from head to foot. They could hear him as he came up Washington Avenue, turning on Eighth, coming up Ninth, calling out “Craaawww-pappies! Red! They’re hot !” “A dime’s worth of red, pretty crawdads was plenty,” Reeves recalled. As it got cooler, the crawdad baskets on each arm were replaced by a tamale cart, with two big wheels in the front and a small one in the back. “Hot ’males! Red! They’re hot !” the man sang, selling three for a nickel. The ice cream man came in the spring and summer, selling cones for three cents a pop.
    Mischief surfaced on days like the Fourth of July, when the boys would go to the park on the corner of Tenth and Washington to shoot cap pistols—“Man, if you didn’t have a cap pistol, you wasn’t nothing!” They were free to wave sparklers, but were warned to stay away from firecrackers. Which they didn’t. “They had these little things called bombs about the size of rum balls,” said Reeves, “and if one of those bombs hit you on the leg, it would hurt.”
    The week before Halloween, Reeves set out with John and Charlie Parker and five or six other boys to celebrate Cabbage Night. They raided cabbage patches and hurled the biggest heads they could find onto porches or against front doors before running for the hills. Halloween was a bad night for outhouses, too: the giggling conspiracy of young boys would pull on masks, go up alleys, and turn over as many as they could, squawling with delight as they made their hotfooted getaway. A block away was a white neighborhood; the people there weren’t rich, but they were doing much better than the Negroes. The pranksters stayed away from