*Non-Fiction — May 29, 2021
The King of Clyde
You do good by your neighbors and they will do good by you. Julius McLean
{
}
.firstcharacter {
float: left;
font-size: 100px;
line-height: 60px;
padding-top: 4px;
padding-right: 8px;
padding-left: 3px;
padding-bottom: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
}
A man of few words, my father felt entitled calling his own people, Niggas. “That Nigga down the street owe me five dollars. Niggas playing that damn loud music get on my last nerve.” And when it came to white folks, they were straight up honkies. “You can’t trust a honky for nothing. Honky stab you in the back in a minute.”
Daddy never talked about the corridor full of people who waited patiently outside the ivory-colored double doors of the visitation room. Mother and I were inside inspecting the mortician’s work. Daddy was dressed in a dark gray suit, blue shirt, gray striped tie and white gloves. I could imagine him yelling, “what the hell y’all got gloves on me for?” I didn’t question it.
Twenty minutes we stared at him. Me, mumbling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Mother, “Oh! Julius, Oh! Julius.” We were both in our separate worlds of grief until the doors opened.
“Is everything okay?” the funeral employee asked.
I nodded.
Mother answered, “He looks good, real nice, like himself.” She had been afraid they would trim too much of his signature mustache, which grew full and silver as he aged.
The funeral lady flung open the doors: “There are people waiting to come in.”
More white people than I’ve ever seen on the South Side of Chicago stood against the wall. Daddy’s co-workers from the industrial scale company, where he worked for years, surrounded us with hugs and condolences. The conversation flowed natural and easy.
“Your father taught me everything I know.”
“He was a mentor and father to me,” said his boss, who broke down when I called to tell him Daddy had died.
“He had just started teaching me.”
The intensity of their sorrow hit heavy as an avalanche. So much love, praise, and enlightening memories filled my soul.
“He always saw the good side of things.”
“I never saw him down until your sister died. That really got to him.”
“Julius was the only person I knew who didn’t need to go on vacation. He was content sitting on his porch and being at home.”
“He loved his family. He was always talking about his children.”
“That man would not throw anything away. Something break, he’d fix it.”
“He’d play the lottery faithfully, hoping to win big for his family.”
“The job is going to be empty without him.”
“I’ll miss him on Fridays, teasing me, ‘don’t forget my check, woman.’ ”
The conversation shifted from sad to ticklish laughter.
“I hope y’all keep the house. He would want that.”
“You could count on Julius to tell you how it was. He didn’t bite his tongue.”
“He’d argue our flower bouquet looks more like a clock than a scale.”
“Yep, Julius would say we didn’t get our money’s worth.”
They definitely knew Daddy well, reminding me of the time a friend dropped by and Daddy says to the woman, “Girl, what you doing, eating the house?” His shameless way of telling her she needed to lose weight.
Several co-workers hugged Daddy and patted his hands or chest as they said their final goodbye.
“So long, good friend.” “We’ll miss you, Julius.”
As they left, some of Daddy’s neighbors and my niece walked by.
“I thought we were in the wrong place when I saw all those white folks,” said a neighbor.
“Me, too,” said Daddy’s youngest granddaughter.
A yes indeed moment, my grandmother would say. Seeing a dozen or so white folks on the South Side spoke volumes about how they felt about my father. The only Black on the job, this Southern man with only an elementary school education taught white men the tricks of his trade.
These were not the “honkies” Daddy referred to when he complained about white people’s stanky attitudes, but rather the white friends he hid in the closet. My father might have actually cried to see them all there for his grand finale. I did.
With horns blaring and arms extended out car windows, it was only fitting the funeral procession drive past Daddy’s house one last time. Neighbors stood on their lawns, throwing kisses, yelling, “We love y’all. Bye, Mr. Mac.”
The day after the burial, my brothers and I walked up the blank, rugged, concrete steps to a shell of a house. Strange, not to talk trash with Daddy or step around him.
Once inside, Daddy’s presence surrounded us. His sunken recliner facing the outdated floor-model TV with the rabbit ears, and the snack tray full of meds. On the fake fireplace mantel, his D-J pictures. I grab my cheerleading trophy and Daddy’s green, well-worn mechanic work coat and red “President’s Lounge” jacket with his name written on the front. My brothers packed their keepsakes and we agreed to talk later about what to do with the house.
7524 Clyde Avenue was our first and only home. A jackpot location in the heart of South Shore’s lakefront neighborhood. The architectural layout, though, was nothing to brag about: one thousand square feet of living space for a family of six—two bedrooms, one bath. My sister and I took the attic. The boys shared the second bedroom downstairs. Rust brown wood floors in the living and dining rooms, and pale-yellow tile in the kitchen and bathroom. The interior wasn’t relevant; dancing after dark in the backyard on cool summer evenings, street races, and block parties held our attention. Only two sets of family have lived in our one-story brick home. The other family was white.
The summer before Daddy died, I descended into the basement, where no one goes except to wash. I treaded softly on the chipped, beat-up, wooden blue-gray painted steps, tightly squeezing the shaky rail, noticing for the first time the basement’s distinct voice. The telling is partly in the assortment of junk that would make the Sanford and Son junkyard appear neat and organized. The madness is absent from the back room, where I find tucked away on the dusty, time-weathered pantry shelves, two deteriorating pictures—a confirmation class photo and a certificate. I run upstairs and show them to my father.
“Daddy, whose pictures are these?”
“I guess the white family who lived here before us.”
“Can I have them? I think there’s a story here.”
“Good luck with that,” he said, giving me his comfortable, pleasing and relaxed smile.
The pictures reveal the first occupants were Swedish Lutherans. The black and white class photo is a 1904 snapshot of 35 white children dressed in Sunday attire: boys with bow ties; girls with ribbons in their bouffant hair. During this time, no Black folks lived on the South Side. The Great Migration North wasn’t even a dream yet. Heck, Daddy hadn’t even been born.
Thinking back in time, I could imagine seeing the expensive gold-plated framed photos hanging proudly in the living room when one or maybe two of the children in the picture called our house, home. When the stairs squeaked, logs burnt in the fireplace.
Thinking back in time, I could imagine seeing the expensive gold-plated framed photos hanging proudly in the living room when one or maybe two of the children in the picture called our house, home. When the stairs squeaked, logs burnt in the fireplace.
Daddy buried the items in the pantry room in a dark, musky basement filled with forgotten, discarded memorabilia for more than a century. The class photo only says Swedish Lutheran-Confirmation Class 1904. The certificate, written in English and Swedish, is screaming with details and stunning with floating angels, hanging grapevines sketched along the sides; a drawing of the “Last Supper”; a rust-colored seal and the engraving Bethlehem Lutheran Church, May 26, 1901.
Holding onto these pictures was important for Daddy, not because of his need to keep everything, but as proof his home was once good enough for white people. In his world, it was inconceivable the type of white folks he despised, the ones he called “honkies,” lived under his roof. In his mind, the first occupants were outstanding South Side residents.
The basement served as a museum of clutter—a mix of what’s no longer needed or useful. At the bottom of the staircase, the faithful washer and gas dryer, still standing and working. On the left, there were memories of youth at its wildest. My yellow Honda 175 motorcycle from graduate school. Leaning against the back wall, four huge commercial weight scales.
“Daddy wouldn’t throw anything away,” said my oldest brother. “The scales were tossed out by the job, but Daddy said they still had value. Worth a lot of money to a junkyard dealer.”
And in the darkest corner, the reason why my father was nicknamed the King of Clyde.
I asked Daddy once, “what do you need all of these old bikes for. My goodness, what is it, two dozen down here?”
He answered, “The kids in the neighborhood, some of them have never had a bike.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I never had one as a kid. You forget about that, huh?” “Oh girl, you grown now. Done had bikes and a motorcycle.”
“Yeah, but it would have been nice to have one growing up.”
“I’m making up for what I didn’t do for y’all. Take me no time to fix these bikes and the kids and their parents be grateful.”
“How did you get so many?” “Pick them up in the alleys.”
“What do you do with the ones that can’t be fixed? There’s a handlebar and seat over
there and you really need to throw those filthy brakes in the garbage.”
there and you really need to throw those filthy brakes in the garbage.”
“In no time, these parts will be bikes again.”
The King’s reach went far beyond dismantled bikes. “The block is not going to be the same without him,” I heard someone say at the funeral.
“I am going to miss my friend,” said the next-door neighbor, who watched him collapse and die in his favorite gray-blue fabric recliner; his lucky chair, which he covered with a blue sheet to protect from getting dirty. Five-dollar bills fell from his pocket and lodged on the sides for months at a time. On retrieval days, sometimes $50 could be recovered. Daddy’s ritual response: “I was broker than broke, too.” A diamond ring appraised at $8,000 mysteriously made its way inside the chair’s guts. Daddy proudly gave it to me as a combination Christmas-birthday present as though he custom ordered it from Tiffany’s. “You’re good for the next two years, Jackie, and don’t ever sell it!”
And when I asked him why he wasn’t going to give me another present for two years, Daddy said, “Girl, hush. Eight-thousand dollars is a lifetime of gifts.”
“Black crows had circled the house for weeks,” said the next-door neighbor. “I knew death was coming for him.”
When I begged him to go to the hospital, the last words I heard from my father brought me reassurance.
“I’m not going to sit here and deteriorate. Don’t worry, Jackie.”
“He was a father to me,” said both twin brothers, the other neighbors who kept him company in the evenings as his health failed. They, too, sat with him on a warm summer night when his heart stopped. Just the night before he told me, “You do good by your neighbors and they will do good by you.”
Daddy died surrounded by his closest neighbors. The lady next door, whose grandfather, long dead, swapped old times with him; and the twins, who did odd jobs around the house.
As a porch squatter, anyone passing by 75th and Clyde saw Daddy, and chances are he not only took the time to say hello but gathered a bit of gossip to add to his front porch chatter for neighbors. For 30 years, Daddy lived alone on Clyde and was seen as the block’s protector. A one-man neighborhood watch program. Before the funeral, a neighbor pleaded with the family, “y’all got to put King of Clyde on his gravestone. He would want that.” We did.
Daddy did not reign as King when we lived on Clyde as a family. Home might as well have been the tavern where he earned his President’s Lounge jacket spinning records. In the back room of the basement lived his love of music. What a collection of albums: 300, if not more, and many wrapped in plastic. Billie Holiday, B. B. King, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye. The albums and dozens of 45s stacked neatly in two separate piles.
Seeing my jam, Going-to-a Go-Go, took me back to the multi-colored swirling lights plugged in at the President’s Lounge, painting the ceiling and dance floor in blinking psychedelic shades of red, blue, orange, purple; grownups swaying, snapping their fingers as fine-tuned instruments and singing Goin’ to a go-go. Everybody’s Goin’ to a go-go.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9. View full issue & more.