Clearly, I had to as well.
I can’t stop thinking about what that librarian said to me: “You can’t change history because you don’t like what you find.” So much of American history lifts up our triumphs, while ignoring our infamy. And though black history is white history, much of it is a painful place to revisit, and so preserving it is not a priority. Changing it — or worse, destroying it — is like saying it never happened. The crimes are perpetrated once again.
In her retirement, Keckly taught at Wilberforce College before returning to Washington, D.C., where she died. The Harmony Cemetery, where she was buried, was paved over in the 1960s and her remains, unclaimed, were placed in an unmarked grave. Unfortunately, I won’t be going to Washington, D.C.
Part IV
Skelsies
In which two to six players assemble around a crooked course of obstacle lines and periodic stopping points chalked on the street or sidewalk pavement. Each player uses fingers to shoot a bottlecap (the “skelly”) step by step through the obstacle course, halting just before the stopping points. Succeeding players may elect to “kill” opponents by knocking into their skelsies en route to the finish.
The Creamflake kid
by Jess Korman
Crown Heights
It was to have been a productive workday. He would grind out six more pages. In the television industry swamp, in that summer of 1985, “pages” meant scripted scenes that a producer deemed worth a camera’s time and trouble. This was how the Burbank geniuses measured their employee’s worth: How many shootable pages could the hack du jour grind out?
According to Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, you could substitute the word pounds for pages. That’s what they wanted. Pounds of shootable crap for a low-budget series set in Brooklyn. They wanted to film “real people” and let them act out the stories, a terrible idea in which a bunch of nobodies carried on like somebodies. It was also wonderfully cheap to produce.
Manufacturing the six pages of this proposed disaster in his eight-by-ten rental office in the Artists and Writers Building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills was no easy feat. The director Billy Wilder rented the office across the hall. The aging and iconic Kirk Douglas, carrying a container of English Breakfast tea, sometimes shuffled through one of the smoked-glass doors three down. Larry’s fellow tenants, highly worshiped avatars of the craft, were a stinging reminder of how low he had sunk in the scheme of things.
Larry Sloan was taking the buck and running. A shameful crime, he felt, but he was getting away with it. After all, nobody got hurt but Larry.
The walls of his office were painted in a particularly tired-out shade of gray. The cool of the Mexican stone floors seeped through his thin-soled Rockports. A dusty window looked out upon an alley, offering a glimpse of bougainvillea and the back wall of a garage. The stunning California sun, as reliable as it was relentless day after day, redeemed an otherwise grim view. As it is said in L.A., another goddamn beautiful day.
The pages were not coming today because Larry Sloan was somewhere else in his head, lost in his own Brooklyn, a long time ago, where his crime wave began.
The Creamflake Bakery, on Utica Avenue between Carroll and President, was a popular establishment in Crown Heights, catering not only to the Jews, but the Irish too, as well as some Italians — and, lately, newly arrived Caribbeans, whatever they were.
You could get challah at the Creamflake and Irish soda breads. Green cookies were sold on St. Patrick’s Day, of course, and elaborate confections were available for Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, and other religious events, such as when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant the year before, which was 1952.
They called him Loo-Loo. The nickname had stuck since his baby days. He was ten now, and Al and Dotty still called him that. This was before being sensitive to your kid’s feelings was called “good parenting.” At P.S. 189 on East New York Avenue, the kids ragged on him about the girly-sounding moniker.
“It’s not Lulu,” he would snarl, spelling it out. “It’s Loo-Loo, you stupid moron.” This was the big put-down of 1953, the gilded age of “moron” jokes on the tube.
Anyhow, Loo-Loo’s skin was thick. He had tons of friends. He was a first-class punch-ball player. He could fire a pink Spalding — duly pronounced spaldeen — the whole length between a pair of sewer covers in a neat trajectory. Automatic homer. On President Street, this was status.
The other thing about Loo-Loo’s popularity was that Al Scharfsky owned the Creamflake. When your father sells chocolate cookies, jelly doughnuts, and charlotte russe, there is no shortage of kids who will gladly accompany you to the bakery for the sweet possibility of a handout.
Jack Horn was Al’s partner. Jack was in charge of cakes. Al himself took care of the breads and rolls. Everything was baked in old stone ovens with piles of coal that glowed eternally in the corners.
Loo-Loo hung around sometimes. Jack and his father would let him squeeze jelly into the doughnuts, using a metal contraption with a lever and a long spout. Sometimes, the Russian help baked alligator-shaped bread with raisin eyes, especially for Loo-Loo. Ten o’clock at night or so, the cops drove by to collect bags of “stale,” leftover breads and rolls which they took back to the 71st Precinct station house on Empire Boulevard.
Along Loo-Loo’s stretch of Utica was the usual constellation of neighborhood shops — fruits and vegetables, butcher, freshly slaughtered chickens, fish, dresses, radio repair, barbers, and a candy store with a soda fountain. Two blocks further up, the retail pattern repeated, including a bakery just like the Creamflake, only it was called the Union because it was near Union Street.
Although people preferred shopping as few steps as possible from where they lived, they would sometimes cross the continent into the next block. Which is why Al Scharfsky considered the Union Bakery his arch competitor, especially in the summer of ’53 with the place under mysterious new management.
Trolley cars once clanged their way up and down Utica, their motormen wearing neckties. Kids put pennies on the tracks and they got flattened out when the cars rattled past. Now there were buses, though the old tracks remained on the cobblestones as parallel reminders of the past, beyond Eastern Parkway into the unknown and ominous infinity of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
This was Loo-Loo’s universe. President Street terminated at the enormous Lincoln Terrace Park, which separated the Andy Hardy tranquility of Crown Heights from the mean and dangerous Brownsville, birthplace of Murder Incorporated. While the park had plenty of green spaces for a game, the kids preferred the “gutter,” a.k.a. the street. Two grand maple trees on either side were markers for first and third. The sewer cover in the middle was second.