Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 921 BELAFONTE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Harry Belafonte is not just one of the greatest entertainers of our time; he has led one of the great American lives of the last century. Now, this extraordinary icon tells us the story of that life, giving us its full breadth, letting us share in the struggles, the tragedies, and, most of all, the inspiring triumphs.
nbsp;
Belafonte grew up, poverty-ridden, in Harlem and Jamaica. His mother was a complex woman--caring but withdrawn, eternally angry and rarely satisfied. His father was distant and physically abusive. It was not an easy life, but it instilled in young Harry the hard-nosed toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle. It also gave him the drive to make good and channel his anger into actions that were positive and life-affirming. His journey led to the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he encountered an onslaught of racism but also fell in love with the woman he eventually married. After the war he moved back to Harlem, where he drifted between odd jobs until he saw his first stage play--and found the life he wanted to lead. Theater opened up a whole new world, one that was artistic and political and made him realize that not only did he have a need to express himself, he had a lot to express.
nbsp;
He began as an actor--and has always thought of himself as such--but was quickly spotted in a musical, began a tentative nightclub career, and soon was on a meteoric rise to become one of the world's most popular singers. Belafonte was never content to simply be an entertainer, however. Even at enormous personal cost, he could not shy away from activism. At first it was a question of personal dignity: breaking down racial barriers that had never been broken before, achieving an enduring popularity with both white and black audiences. Then his activism broadened to a lifelong, passionate involvement at the heart of the civil rights movement and countless other political and social causes. The sections on the rise of the civil rights movement are perhaps the most moving in the book: his close friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr.; his role as a conduit between Dr. King and the Kennedys; his up-close involvement with the demonstrations and awareness of the hatred and potential violence around him; his devastation at Dr. King's death and his continuing fight for what he believes is right.
nbsp;
But My Song is far more than the history of a movement. It is a very personal look at the people in that movement and the world in which Belafonte has long moved. He has befriended many beloved and important figures in both entertainment and politics--Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sidney Poitier, John F. Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Tony Bennett, Bill Clinton--and writes about them with the same exceptional candor with which he reveals himself on every page. This is a book that pulls no punches, and turns both a loving and critical eye on our country's cultural past.
nbsp;
As both an artist and an activist, Belafonte has touched countless lives. With My Song, he has found yet another way to entertain and inspire us. It is an electrifying memoir from a remarkable man.
Author Notes
Michael Shnayerson is a staff writer at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Belafonte, actor and activist, whose voice is known to millions for his opening line, "Day-O!" to "The Banana Boat Song," stepped out of a life of poverty and up to a microphone in the late 1940s, launching a brilliant career as a singer, actor, and activist. With lyrical grace, he chronicles his life from early childhood-where a violent father made life difficult for him, his brother, and his mother-and his first singing engagements, to the difficulties in his own marriages, the grueling life on the show circuit, and his later involvement in the civil rights movement and other social causes. After his hitch in the service, he enrolls in acting lessons with the American Negro Theater, where he meets his life-long friend, Sidney Poitier, and numerous other influential black actors. On a cold January night in 1949, the owner of the Royal Roost night club in New York asks Belafonte to sing a few numbers during intermission for Lester Young's band; astonished and anxious, the young singer steps onto the stage and finds himself backed by Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Al Haig, and Tommy Potter, four of jazz's greatest musicians, and his musical career takes off. These musicians' generosity instill the same compassion in him, and his encounter with great concert singer, athlete, and actor Paul Robeson teaches him that he can use his music and his concerts as pulpits for important causes. Belafonte sometimes exhausts with too many details, but he mostly carries us liltingly along with his song that the best times always lie ahead as long as we take care of each other. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Belafonte has lived his life juggling cultures West Indian and American, black and white, poor and rich. He used the considerable skill he acquired thereby to cross the racial divide as a performer and as an activist. He recalls how involvement in the nonviolent civil rights movement, along with therapy, helped him quell the anger lingering from an early life of grinding poverty. His childhood was tumultuous, as he traveled between Harlem and Jamaica, learning the harsh lessons of American racism. Following a stint in the navy, he used the GI bill to enroll in acting school, where Marlon Brando was among his classmates. There were few prospects for black actors, but he got a break that launched his singing career. But he never forgot the anger borne of poverty and racial injustice, using his celebrity to gain financial and other support for the civil rights movement, once traveling to the South with Sidney Poitier to deliver $70,000 in cash to those fighting for voting rights. Belafonte looks back on a fascinating life and career and friendships with notables from Paul Robeson to Nelson Mandela. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Knopf is banking on the wide appeal of Harry Belafonte's rags-to-riches memoir with a 150,000-copy first printing and an 11-city tour.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
As a singer and actor, Harry Belafonte was both a matinee idol and a proud black man. HERE is a gorgeous account of the large life of a Harlem boy, son of a Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, and a ship's cook, Harold Bellanfanti, who endured the grind of poverty under the watchful eye of his proud mother and waited for his chances, prepared to be lucky, and made himself into the international calypso star and popular folk singer, huge in Las Vegas, also Europe, and a mainstay of the civil rights movement of the '60s, a confidant of Dr. King's, who lived for years in a U-shaped 21-room apartment on West End Avenue, but never forgot what he ran so hard to escape from, the four or five families squeezed into a few rooms, the smell of Caribbean food cooking, the shared bathroom, his father drunk, yelling, blood on his hands, beating his motherland "a terrible claustrophobic closet of fear." His mother found refuge in the Catholic Church. The Holy Roller preachers of her native Jamaica were "too niggerish" for her. She loved the marble majesty of Catholicism and sent the boy off to parochial school to suffer at the hands of the nuns and took him to Mass every Sunday, dressed in a blue suit, and afterward to the Apollo Theater to hear Cab Calloway or Count Basie or Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald. "As suffocating and interminable as Mass seemed, I could endure it if I knew that a few short hours later I'd be in the real cathedral of spirituality ... the Apollo." Ellington lived nearby, so did Langsten Hughes. "Most of the famous black Americans of the day lived there, rubbing shoulders with the rest of us; they certainly weren't welcome in the fancy buildings south of 96th Street." One of the boy's heroes was A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. "I just loved watching him lead his troops through Harlem on parade, with their red collars and shiny buttons and red caps tilted just so. Everyone admired the porters ... because they were worldly - they traveled far and wide - and because most had college degrees." Discouraged by the grind, his mother took 9-year-old Harry and his younger brother, Dennis, back to Jamaica in 1936. Harry loved his white Jamaican grandmother, Jane, who lived in a wood-frame house on stilts on a hillside near Ocho Rios ("For the rest of my life, I would feel an unusual sense of ease in moving between races and classes - an ease that would help me as an entertainer, later as an activist," which "traces to the fact that Jane, who was as white and blue-eyed as a person can be, so enveloped me with love"), but his mother delivered him to a Britishstyle boarding school as he begged her to change her mind. "I watched the taxi roll off, and the school gates close behind it. Finally I ran at the gate, devastated, and put my face through the bars, howling with grief and fear. ... I wept and wept. I couldn't eat that night; I didn't take a proper meal for days. Then one morning I woke up and found myself completely self-reliant. My mother had abandoned me; nothing could change that fact I would never again look to my mother for love. I was now a world of one." Back in New York, he dropped out of high school, worked odd jobs, enlisted in the Navy, got out in 1945 and went to work as a janitor in an apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue. One day he installed Venetian blinds for a tenant, an actress in the American Negro Theater, who gave him tickets to a play they were performing - "about returning black servicemen trying to establish postwar lives in Harlem. . . . That play didn't just speak to me. It mesmerized me." He joined the company, then a theater workshop at the New School - fellow students: Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Elaine Striteli, Wally Cox, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando. "I'd never met a white man who so thoroughly embraced black culture. He loved going with me to jazz clubs... Marlon was a prankster; if he saw you napping, he'd tie your shoelaces together. . . . But as a friend, he was bedrock loyal." One of the jazz clubs was the Royal Roost, where the saxophonist Lester Young played. He saw Harry sing onstage in a New School production and got him a gig at the Roost. "I'm not a singer. What you saw me do was acting," said Harry Belafonte, but he took the job for $70 a week singing standards like "Pennies From Heaven" and "Stardust" and "Skylark" and made his debut backed by Charlie Parker, Max Roach on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Lester Young's pianist, Al Haig - four jazz luminaries doing a favor for a 21-year-old guy they knew because he hung around the club a lot. He did 22 weeks at the Royal Roost, made a record that Symphony Sid promoted on his WJZ radio show, played the Black Orchid in Chicago and the RendezVous Room in Philly, then Café Society in New York for more than $350 a week. ("I had a voice the crowd liked, and a look. . . And for white authences, I carried a reassuring presence, enhanced by my Caribbean diction. Black, but . . . not too black.") And then, in 1951, under the influence of Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger and friends in the Village, he turned toward folk music - "Shenandoah" and chain-gang songs and ballads - played three months at the Village Vanguard, then two months at the Blue Angel on East 55th, and in 1952 made his first calypso record, "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)." Seven years out of the Navy, he had a record deal with RCA Victor and an MGM movie, "Bright Road," with Dorothy Dandridge, and his Las Vegas debut at the Thunderbird, where he learned that he could master a crowd of loud drunks by walking onstage stern-faced and singing at the top of his voice a chain-gang song ("TIMMMMBBER! Lord, this timber gotta roll") and then another, maybe a third, unsmiling, no word of greeting. "I would feel the crowd growing tense. When at last I switched to an upbeat song - and flashed them a first grin - I could hear the collective sigh. . . . For the rest of the act, I could be as light and jokey as I wanted to be. They were mine." Years later, cast as a gangster in Robert Altman's "Kansas City," Belafonte writes, "I realized I could play mean. I just had to summon that old hard streak, the one that had pulled me out of poverty." The problem of authenticity dogged Belafonte. He wasn't from the South, didn't play guitar, wasn't a true Jamaican, "wasn't African-American. He was an entertainer, an actor performing songs. The blacklist almost tripped him up in 1954, when he was accused in print of being a "Communist fronter" and Ed Sullivan, a powerful man in the television world, called Belafonte up to his apartment in the Delmonico Hotel to explain himself. In 1956, his life more or less split in two. His album "Calypso" came out with "Jamaica Farewell" and "Day-O" and was No. 1 on the Billboard chart for 31 weeks until Elvis knocked it off. And "one day in the spring of 1956, I picked up the phone to hear a courtly Southern voice. 'You don't know me, Mr. Belafonte, but my name is Martin Luther King Jr.' . . . 'Oh, I know you,' I said. 'Everybody knows you.'" King was known for the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, which had begun in December, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. King invited Belafonte to meet him at a fund-raising rally at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, "His sermon from the pulpit of that Harlem church rocked me. . . . He might be young - two years younger than I was - but he was fully loaded." Belafonte was struck by King's sense of calm. "He seemed unaffected by the crowd, at peace with himself. . . . I was taken by his humility. It wasn't false humility; I knew the difference. Nor was it humility in the service of charm. This man was both determined to do what he saw as his mission - and truly overwhelmed by it. . . . Here was the real deal, a leader both inspired and daunte'd by the burden he'd taken on. . . . I said I'd help him any way I could. And for the next 12 years, that's, what I did." AS the Beatles arrive in 1964, Belafonte is still hot - a month after the Fab Four get 13 minutes on the Sullivan show, Belafonte gets 22 minutes - "but that giddy sense of being the hottest thing in showbiz - that would start to fade." His band goes electric and he injures his voice trying to sing over it and. goes to a doctor who removes a node on his vocal cords and his voice is never the same. A disaster for a singer, which Belafonte deals with in a few paragraphs. The March on Birmingham takes up almost 20 pages. (Belafonte the activist and unabashed lefty who didn't hesitate to get in Bobby Kennedy's face is still alive and kicking. "About my own life, I have no complaints," he writes. "Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago. And as I write this, our president has yet to acknowledge that this fact is of any concern to him. . . . For all of his smoothness and intellect, Barack Obama seems to lack a fundamental empathy with the dispossessed, be they white or black.") Dr. King is one strong strand in "My Song"; another is Belafonte's family saga through three marriages with four children; another is his inner life, psychoanalysis, the wounds of childhood, his gambling addiction; another, the oddity of show business, the casual flings, the personal manager who turned out to be an F.B.I. informer. Indelible characters pass by: Sidney Poitier, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Fidel Castro, Miriam Makeba. Fascinating segues: you go from Frank Sinatra's bad temper at the baccarat table in a casino ("Frank would start out cool, though even then, you sensed his lethal edge") straight to a lunch date with Martin and Coretta in Atlanta as the civil rights movement is picking up steam. Scenes of extravagant waste, scenes of righteous anger - rich contradictions abound - with little attempt to explain them away, a mark of the honest autobiographer. "I said I'd help him in any way I could": Belafonte and Martin Luther King, backstage at Madison Square Garden. Young Harry's mother embraced Catholicism; for him, 'the real cathedral of spirituality' was the Apollo. Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of "A Prairie Home Companion."
Kirkus Review
The noted entertainer and activist looks back over his tumultuous life.Being the first singer to sell 1 million copies of an album (Calypsoin 1956) and writing his own ticket at the otherwise segregated Riviera in Las Vegas did little to assuage Belafonte's fury at the discrimination he had experienced before he made it big. Nor had the emotional scars healed from a poverty-stricken childhood with a severely depressed, impossible-to-please mother, he acknowledges in this forthright memoir, ably co-authored by veteran reporter Shnayerson (Coal River,2008, etc.).Not until he met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 did Belafonte find a way to channel his rage into the larger struggle for racial justice. He would become as well known for his unswerving commitment to civil rights as for his records and concerts. He planned strategy with King; funded the young rebels at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council; acted as a liaison to the hesitant Kennedy administration; and recruited the celebrity-studded lineup for the March on Washington. Though never as big a movie star as his friend Sidney Poitier, about whom he writes with equal parts affection and competitiveness, Belafonte also had some successes in film, most notably opposite Dorothy Dandridge inCarmen Jones(1954) and in Robert Altman'sKansas City(1996). He recounts these highlights, as well as three marriages, four kids, a half-century in Freudian analysis, and lots more, with frankness and bite. He has mellowed not at all in old age, calling George Bush a terrorist in 2006 and judging President Obama to be insufficiently compassionate and committed to the poor. Yet Belafonte's bluntness and vast ego aren't too hard to take, since they are so often applied to the service of others, not just in the '50s and '60s but into the '80s with the "We Are the World" video for African famine relief and currently in his Gathering for Justice project to train minority youths in nonviolent activism.Bracingly opinionated autobiography from an American original, still provocative in his ninth decade.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Well-known singer and actor Belafonte begins his memoir in 1964, when he and Sidney Poitier brought $70,000 in cash to Mississippi to help the struggling Civil Rights Movement. Belafonte has been politically active throughout his life (he does not back away from his public statement that George W. Bush is a "terrorist"), and one strand of his memoir deals with the causes he has supported. He also discusses his private life-born in poverty in New York City and of Jamaican heritage, Belafonte saw service in the U.S. Navy and has had several failed marriages. He covers his public career as an American entertainment icon (which solidified with his 1956 album, Calypso) and his interactions with many politicians and celebrities, e.g., Paul Robeson, Poitier, Marlon Brando, and Robert Kennedy, among many others. How these different strands interweave-the anger generated by the poverty and racial discrimination of his early years, the socially conscious reformer, and the well-respected entertainer-make for a potent memoir of our times. Verdict Beyond the usual interest generated by celebrity biographies, Belafonte's civil rights activism and involvement in other social causes give his memoir broader relevance. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/11.]-Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M Univ.-Kingsville (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The phone rang late in the evening in my New York apartment. It was the night of August 4, 1964. A night of grief and anger for all of us in the civil rights movement, but especially those in Mississippi. "We've got a crisis on our hands down here," the young man on the line said. "We need help." At the start of that fateful summer, hundreds of volunteers, most of them students, many of them white, all of them knowing how dangerous the work would be, had come down from northern universities to register black voters and support rural blacks in pursuit of their civil rights. They were fanning out along the front lines of a civil rights war, unarmed in a state of seething segregationists. Mississippi's police stood ready at the slightest pretext to beat them bloody and throw them in jail. The Ku Klux Klan might well do worse. That day, we all learned just how much worse. The bodies of three volunteers, missing since June 21, had been found in a shallow grave near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman-- two of them white, one black-- had been arrested on an alleged traffic violation, briefl y jailed, then allowed to drive off, after dark, into a KKK ambush. All three had been beaten, then shot. Chaney, the black volunteer, had been tortured and mutilated. I'd helped raise a lot of the money to launch Mississippi Freedom Summer. I'd called all the top entertainers I knew-- Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, Dick Gregory, and more-- to ask that they give money directly or participate in benefit concerts. That money bought a lot of gas and cars, housing and food. But now more was needed. A lot more. The original plan had called for students to do two-week shifts, then go home and be replaced by others. With the ominous disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, every shift had insisted on staying. Now that the bodies had been found, all those volunteers voted to stay not just through summer, but into the fall as well. "It's good they're staying," explained Jim Forman, the young man who called me that night. Jim was the de facto head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of several civil rights groups down there. "Because if they leave now, or even at the end of August, the Klan will say it intimidated them into going, and the press will play it that way. And if they all stay, we can get thousands of more voters registered. The problem is we don't have the resources to keep them all here." "What do you need?" I asked. "At least fifty thousand dollars." I told him I'd get it, one way or the other. "How soon do you need it?" "We're going to burn through the rest of our budget in seventy-two hours." Before he rang off, Forman told me one other thing. "This could get really ugly," he said quietly. "I'm hearing a lot of people say enough is enough, the hell with nonviolence. They're taking up guns. I'm worried they're going to take matters into their own hands." I had to think hard about where that money might come from, and how I might get it to Greenwood, Mississippi. I could tap my own savings for the whole $50,000-- I'd written a check to SNCC for an amount not much smaller than that in its early days to help establish it, and others since then. For me it was "anything goes," but I owed it to my family to keep us fi nancially safe. Paul Robeson, the extraordinary actor, singer, and activist whose path I'd tried to follow my whole adult life, had given so much money to social causes that he'd left himself vulnerable to his enemies, chief among them the federal government, a formidable force led by J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, when he was blacklisted as a communist in the late 1940s. With Senator Joseph McCarthy riding shotgun, the federal government had cowed Carnegie Hall and other American venues into not hiring him, then seized his passport so that he couldn't earn a living performing abroad. Eventually Paul ran through his savings and slid into a deep place of sadness. I never forgot that. Somehow, I'd have to raise most of this money from others. In two days, maybe three. Then there was the matter of how that money would get to Mississippi. I couldn't just wire it and have a black civil rights activist go to the local Western Union offi ce to ask for his $50,000, please. He'd be dead before he drove a mile away. So would a white college volunteer. As for banks, those fi ne institutions owned and operated by Mississippi's white power elite? No way. The money would have to be brought down in cash. And unless I could come up with some brighter idea, I'd have to take it down myself. My wife, Julie, started pulling together a New York fundraiser at our West End Avenue apartment. I fl ew to Chicago. Irv Kupcinet, as powerful a columnist in his city as Walter Winchell was in New York, gathered dozens of guests at his home on a day or two's notice. White guests, bearing checkbooks. Why did I, as a black performer, have such sway with Irv and his friends? Our friendship traced back to my clubcircuit days as a young troubadour in the early fi fties, but our personal history was just one part of it. Without quite knowing how I did it, I had some power to reach a hand across the racial divide. That, I knew, had as much to do with the moment as with me. Galvanized by the shocking news of the volunteers' murders, Irv's guests thrust cash and checks at me-- $35,000 worth-- as if I was the personal emissary of the civil rights movement. Which in a way, in that place and on that evening, I was. After making a trip to Montreal, I had another $20,000. When I got back to New York, Julie and I took in $15,000 more from our own apartment fundraiser. Time was running out: I'd hoped to raise $100,000, but $70,000 would have to do. I felt pretty good about that sum of money. I felt even better now that I had a sidekick for the trip: my pal from our days together as struggling actors in Harlem, Sidney Poitier. Sidney and I were like brothers. Born within eight days of each other, we shared the same West Indian heritage, and the same burning desire to break out of grinding poverty. Incredibly, both of us had achieved our dreams as entertainers. Sidney was the top black actor in Hollywood. I'd found my first successes as a singer, but had gone on to my own share of Broadway and Hollywood triumphs. We were, to put it simply, the two top black male entertainers in the world. Like brothers, we were also fiercely competitive, and had our differences, both political and personal. For starters, Sidney was a lot more cautious than I was. "What kind of protection are you going to have?" he asked warily when I asked him to come. "I talked to Bobby about it," I said. Robert F. Kennedy was still serving, after his brother's assassination, as U.S. Attorney General under President Johnson. He'd directed me to Burke Marshall, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Both understood the risk I was taking. In Mississippi's vicious climate, the chances of a Klansman taking a potshot at me were actually pretty high. Knocking off that rich Negro singer from New York who thought he knew what was best for the South? Ten points! Marshall heard me out on the phone, and took down my itinerary. I conveyed all this to Sidney, maybe presuming a bit more from my conversation with Marshall than I should have. "Marshall's on it," I told him. "That means federal security every step of the way." "Every step of the way," Sidney echoed. "Right," I said. "Besides, it'll be harder for them to knock off two black stars than one. Strength in numbers, man." "Okay," Sidney said grimly. "But after this, Harry?" "Yeah?" "Never call me again." I knew Sidney well enough to know he meant it-- at least at that moment. Of course I chose to view his fury as a joke and laughed it off, but I laughed alone. Unaccompanied, and not making much conversation, the two of us boarded a plane in Newark, New Jersey, bound for Jackson, Mississippi. I'd deposited the fundraiser checks and replaced them with cash, so we had $70,000 in small bills stuffed into a black doctor's bag. In that long- ago time, no one asked us what we were carrying. A flight attendant just waved us aboard. Our flight to Jackson was the evening's last one into the main airport. We found Jim Forman and two other SNCC volunteers waiting for us, but otherwise the terminal sat virtually deserted. The only sign of local authority we saw was a black maintenance man pushing a broom. Sidney shot me an angry glance. "That's our federal security?" "Probably an FBI agent in disguise," I told him. Sidney didn't so much as chuckle. The volunteers led us out into the heavy, humid Mississippi night and over to a private strip beside the airport where a little Cessna was waiting. The pilot, who was white, greeted us most soberly, with a deep southern accent. As we piled in, I stole another look at him. Was he a Klansman, leading us into a trap? He sure seemed to fit the role. My fears deepened as the tiny plane fl ew toward Greenwood. It was a bumpy ride. The pilot seemed unconcerned. We took every pitch of the plane as the beginning of the end. Finally we landed on a dirt runway beside a shack that constituted Greenwood's airport. The pilot taxied past it, and then back, let us out, and took off immediately. What did he know that we didn't? I looked around, struck as much by the darkness as by the heat. I'd never seen a night as black as this. A poem called "The Creation," by James Weldon Johnson, came back to me. . . . far as the eye of God could see Darkness covered everything, Blacker than a hundred midnights Down in a cypress swamp. Two more SNCC volunteers were waiting for us, with two cars, to take us into town. Sidney and I slid into the back of one, with Jim Forman in the passenger seat and a young SNCCer named Willie Blue in the driver's seat; the rest got into the second car. Both cars had been sanded to a dull fi nish so they wouldn't shine at night. A good precaution, but not good enough: As Willie and the other driver started their engines, a long row of headlights flashed on at the far end of the dark airfield. "That must be the federal agents," I said to Sidney. But we could see that the pairs of headlights were at different heights, and they blazed with differing degrees of brightness. Willie Blue dashed my hopes. "Agents, my ass," he muttered. "That's the Klan." Instead of driving away from the row of headlights, in the direction of the main road to town, Willie and the other driver started moving at full speed toward them. We got close enough to see the dim outlines of three or four old pickup trucks. Then, as if at some prearranged signal, Willie and the other driver veered off to the side, taking a rough, alternative route to the road that led to town. The pickups fell in line behind us. "Why aren't you driving faster?" I shouted. Willie was keeping right to the forty-mile-an-hour speed limit. "Faster, man!" "No," Willie shouted back. "That's exactly what they want us to do. They got a state trooper up there waiting in his car with the headlights off, ready to arrest us for speeding. He takes us to the station, lets us out in an hour, and even more of the Klan be waiting for us. That's how they work. That's how those boys got killed." From behind us, the fi rst pickup truck sped up and started to pass us. Through the rear window, we could see it had a two-by- four across its grille-- a makeshift battering ram-- and no license plate. Willie swerved into the middle of the two- lane road to keep the pickup from pulling alongside. Now the pickup started ramming the back of our car. "We can't let him pull up beside us," Willie shouted. "They'll shoot." Willie switched on his walkie-talkie and radioed the SNCC office in Greenwood. From the other walkie- talkie I heard a crackling voice: "We're on our way." The pickup truck kept ramming our car, but Willie stayed doggedly to the center of the road, edging left every time the truck tried to pull up. Finally, after two or three terrifying minutes that seemed like forever, I looked down the road to see a convoy of cars coming toward us from Greenwood. "That's them," Willie said. The SNCC brigade to the rescue. My heart was still pounding, but I started to breathe again. As the convoy approached, the pickup trucks slowed, and their headlights retreated. That was when we heard the shots, a dozen or more. Whether the Klansmen were fi ring at us or shooting up in the air, we couldn't tell. No one was hit, and no bullets pierced our cars. When we turned off the main road, secure now among the SNCC fleet, we looked back to see the pickups rolling off down the main road, with more gunfire as they went. The convoy led us into Greenwood, and beyond, to an Elks hall, where hundreds of volunteers were gathered. They had spent the day in heated debate, tense and tired, over what their next moves should be. Most of their options depended on us. When Sidney and I walked in, screams of joy went up from the crowd. Sidney and I had heard a lot of applause in our day, but never anything like those cheers. After weeks of lonely, scary fieldwork, these volunteers were wrung out and in despair. To have two of the biggest black stars in the world walk in to show solidarity with them-- that meant a lot to them, and to us. The crowd took up a freedom song, and then another-- the spirituals that had given these brave volunteers comfort and encouragement day after day. Finally Sidney spoke. "I am thirty- seven years old," he told the crowd. "I have been a lonely man all my life . . . because I have not found love . . . but this room is overflowing with it." Then Sidney turned to me. I let a pause fall over the room, then sang out, " Day- o . . ." The crowd picked it up with a roar. The "Banana Boat Song" was my musical signature, but more than that, it was a cry from the heart of poor workers, a cry of weariness mingled with hope, both of which those volunteers felt profoundly that night. " Day- o, Day- o / Daylight come an' me wan' go home" had also been turned into a civil rights anthem-- "Freedom, freedom, freedom come an' it won't be long." When the crowd had sung both versions, I held up the black satchel I'd brought, upturned it on the table in front of me, and let the bundles of cash cascade out, to delirious shouts. As Sidney had said, we felt a lot of love in that barn. Outside it, though, Ku Klux Klanners sat in idling cars; we could hardly keep them out of Greenwood. That day planes had fl own overhead, dropping KKK leaflets that urged Mississippians not to let the niggers steal their rights. Late that night, after a dinner of chicken and spareribs, Sidney and I were escorted to the house where we were to sleep, with armed guards patrolling outside. Our bedroom had one double bed-- not too big a double bed, either-- shoved up against a wall under a window. Sidney blanched. "Look, I'll take the inside, okay?" I told him, meaning the side by the wall. I meant it as a concession: I'd be the one scrunched in by my snoring bedmate. Sidney gave me a suspicious look. "Yeah, but if someone sticks a gun through that window and shoots, I'll be more apt to get hit." He was only half joking. "Okay, okay, I'll take the outside," I said. Sidney thought about that. If I was willing to take the outside, maybe it was the better side after all. "No, I'll take the outside," he said. "If you do get shot, I'd hate to have to climb over your dead ass to get to the door." In bed with the light out, we talked for a while. I told Sidney some of my ghost stories. Finally I fell into a ragged sleep, only to be awakened, in the pitch darkness, by a strange rasping sound. I reached over to nudge Sidney awake. The other side of the bed was empty. The rasping sound was louder. "Sidney?" "Yes," he rasped. "What the fuck are you doing?" "Push-ups," Sidney said. "I can't sleep. And when those motherfuckers come for us, I want to be sure I'm ready." Often in the days after I got home to my wife and children, I asked myself why I had taken on the civil rights movement as my personal crusade. I knew the reason I'd gotten involved in general--any black American with a pulse and a conscience had done that by the summer of 1964, at least to the extent of writing the occasional check. A lot of white Americans had, too. All of us sensed this was a point at which history simply had to turn. We couldn't tolerate more lynchings and beatings. We couldn't abide more "whites-only" signs on the hotels and restaurants and gas stations and water fountains and bus stations of the segregated South. We couldn't let black Americans be treated as slaves in all but name anymore. This we knew. But why did I feel so personally offended, sitting in my twenty-one-room apartment on West End Avenue, when I saw news pictures of student protesters beaten by truncheon- wielding state police and bitten by police attack dogs? What deep wellspring of anger did those images bring up, and why had I felt so angry, for so long, about so many other related issues of freedom, and democracy, and equality, as if the perpetrators of these grave indignities-- from the president to the FBI to the military to the man in the street-- had set out to do me wrong? And why, when I also cared so much about making a success of myself as an actor and singer, had I jeopardized--in some ways damaged--a career trajectory that had made me, at thirty, the world's first so-called black matinee idol? My mother had a lot to do with it. To a lesser degree my father, but he was in there. I also knew that from childhood, I'd occupied a lonely place, not just between West Indian and American culture, but between black and white. And in both the actual worlds I'd balanced between as a kid-- Kingston and Harlem-- I was as poor as poor could be. I was definitely angry about that . Long after I'd immersed myself in the civil rights movement, I would still be trying to understand that anger and make it melt away. With Martin Luther King, Jr., to guide me, I would embrace nonviolence--not just as an organizing tactic, but as a way of life. Half a century of Freudian analysis would help, too. But as I began to set down the story of my life, I would still be piecing the parts together. I know more now than when I started this book. I see the little boy I was, in all his complexities, angry and hurt, almost always alone. Yet why this little boy, among all others, should use his anger to push himself up, make a name for himself, and then make it his mission to smash racial barriers and injustice with such grim determination, I'm not sure I can say. Perhaps, in the end, where your anger comes from is less important than what you do with it. Excerpted from My Song: Die Autobiographie by Harry Belafonte, Michael Shnayerson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
