The hardest word for me to learn how to say was nigger. After Panama came, the white boys slowly started leaving The Hill, until I was the last. Then I became one of the niggers. "Fuck you, nigger." "What you talking about, nigger?" "You're a crazy nigger, aren't you?" "The cops are going to clear all us niggers out of here soon." Of course, I was also known as the white boy in conversations where I wasn't present. Nigger and white boy aren't as loaded words in jail as outside. Just descriptive. The Hill wasn't jail. It was like a holding tank. A matter of time and everyone would eventually head back there. Jail was the only escape from the habit. The habit, I'm sure, felt like the only escape from jail.
Still, I was Chief most of the time, White Boy only to strangers. Gabriele was Mrs. Chief. The name "Blue" is descriptive by skin color. There are more blacks named Blue than anything else. "You know, Crazy Blue" "Old Man, Blue" "Traffic, Blue" "Slim, Blue" "Blue, Blue" "Young Blood, Blue". When you get a flush in spades, you say "all blue" when turning your cards over. To the eye, spades give off a hue that makes them appear blacker than clubs. Most hands, All Blue is a winner.
Theater is a royal flush, an impossible hand to beat. But unless someone else is in the game, betting against you with another great hand, you might as well have nothing. I remember seeing Fugard's play at Yale Rep. The white boys' standing ovation at the end of this anti-apartheid play that was banned in South Africa. If "Lloyd Richards, Blue" or Athol Fugard or any of the other white boys in the audience went more than three blocks away from the Rep in search of their parked cars, the New Haven niggers would have mugged them. It happened all the time. Everywhere the Have and Have Not. Theater is performed where it is banned, not applauded. Otherwise the royal flush may as well be a lousy stinking pair.
