GEORGE CURETON
147
Jack had thought about moving but he knew that Spruce Street, where
the store was located, was the main street for business in our section of
town, so he stayed and put up with the problem.
We boys all knew whose parents did domestic work; the evidence
was visible in the clothes we wore. I begged Mom to bleach out
"Bradley Beach" from my T-shirt, because I didn't want my classmates
making jokes about my visit to Bradley Beach, where the Jewish kids in
the neighborhood went to summer camp.
It
was a standing joke among
the boys as to which camp they would "go to" the coming summer.
Knowing that I would get Mikey's hand-me-downs, 1 tried to get
him to choose clothes he thought 1 would like. His mother would shake
her head at his choice of colors. Though he didn't say it, I'm sure she
told him that only blacks wore colors like that. When we were playing,
I would tell him to take off his shoes because 1 didn't want them all
scuffed and scratched when they came to me . He'd just laugh. 1 some–
times wonder how he felt , seeing his last-year's school clothes as my this–
year's school clothes. (1 might add that after Mom got through fixing
them up they looked better on me than they had on him.)
The two worst high school football teams in Newark were South
Side High and Weequahic High. The South Side team was made up of
Jews and Negroes. Weequahic's ethnicity was made clear in its cheer:
"Ikey, Mikey,Jake and Sam,
We're
th~
boys who eat no ham!
We play football, we play soccer,
We eat matzahs in our locker!
Aye, Aye, Aye, Weequahic High!"
Whenever either team beat the other, it was considered a successful
season by the victor. Many of the players on the South Side team had
cousins on the Weequahic team, so for bragging rights each team played
its hardest to win.
South Side High was known by the other schools in Newark as the
school with the niggers and the Jews. Not only did we get beaten on
the football field, our opponents also wanted to beat us after the game.
We had to run for our lives after every game. We joked often about the
Negro-Jewish makeup of our team. Teams with a few blacks or Jews did
very well, but when the team was all Jewish, or half-Jewish and half–
Negro - disaster. Weequahic's problem seemed to be that all their
biggest boys were playing in the band. Ours was that nearly all our good
players were ineligible because of poor grades. I guess football just wasn't
our sport - or so the coach seemed to imply when he told us to go out
and "lose with dignity."
