Courtesy of Harry Belafonte
"I pronounced I'd help him in any approach we could": Belafonte as well as Martin Luther King, backstage during Madison Square Garden.
Here is the beautiful account of the vast life of the Harlem boy, son of the Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, as well as the ship's cook, Harold Bellanfanti, who endured the grind of poverty underneath the sharp eye of his proud mom as well as waited for his chances, rebuilt to be lucky, as well as done himself in to the general calypso star as well as popular folk singer, outrageous in Las Vegas, additionally Europe, as well as the mainstay of the polite rights movement of the '60s, the confidant of Dr. King's, who lived for years in the U-shaped 21-room unit upon West End Avenue, though never forgot what he ran so tough to escape from, the 4 or 5 families squeezed in to the couple of rooms, the smell of Caribbean food cooking, the shared bathroom, his father drunk, yelling, blood upon his hands, beating his mother, as well as "a terrible claustrophobic broom closet of fear."
MY SONG
A Memoir
By Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson
Illustrated. 469 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $ 30.50.
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Times Topic: Harry Belafonte
His mom found retreat in the Catholic Church. The Holy Roller preachers of her local Jamaica were "too niggerish" for her. She desired the marble majesty of Catholicism as well as sent the boy off to parochial propagandize to suffer during the hands of the nuns as well as took him to Mass every Sunday, dressed in the blue suit, as well as following to the Apollo Theater to listen to Cab Calloway or Count Basie or Duke Ellington, Billie Holi! day, Ell a Fitzgerald. "As suffocating as well as interminable as Mass seemed, we could continue it if we knew which the couple of short hours after I'd be in the genuine cathedral of spirituality . . . the Apollo."
Ellington lived nearby, so did Langston Hughes. "Most of the famous black Americans of the day lived there, rubbing off shoulders with the rest of us; they certainly weren't welcome in the whim buildings south of 96th Street." One of the boy's heroes was A. Philip Randolph, conduct of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. "I only desired examination him lead his infantry by Harlem upon parade, with their red collars as well as glossy buttons as well as red caps tilted only so. Everyone admired the porters . . . since they were secular they trafficked distant as well as wide as well as since many had college degrees."
Discouraged by the grind, his mom took 9-year-old Harry as well as his younger brother, Dennis, during the back of to Jamaica in 1936. Harry desired his white Jamaican grandmother, Jane, who lived in the wood-frame residence upon stilts upon the bank nearby Ocho Rios ("For the rest of my life, we would feel an unusual sense of palliate in relocating between races as well as classes an palliate which would help me as an entertainer, after as an activist," which "traces to the actuality which Jane, who was as white as well as blue-eyed as the chairman can be, so enveloped me with love"), though his mom delivered him to the British-style boarding propagandize as he begged her to shift her mind.
"I watched the taxi hurl off, as well as the propagandize gates close during the back of it. Finally we ran during the gate, devastated, as well as put my face by the bars, utterance with grief as well as fear. . . . we wept as well as wept. we couldn't eat which night; we didn't take the correct dish for days. Then the single morning we woke up as well as found myself utterly self-reliant. My mom had abandoned me; zero could shift which fact. we would never again demeanour ! to my mo m for love. we was now the universe of one."
Back in New York, he dropped out of high school, worked odd jobs, enlisted in the Navy, got out in 1945 as well as went to work as the janitor in an unit office building upon Amsterdam Avenue. One day he installed Venetian blinds for the tenant, an singer in the American Negro Theater, who gave him tickets to the fool around they were performing "about returning black servicemen perplexing to establish postwar lives in Harlem. . . . That fool around didn't only verbalise to me. It mesmerized me." He assimilated the company, afterwards the theater workshop during the New School fellow students: Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Wally Cox, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando. "I'd never met the white male who so entirely embraced black culture. He desired going with me to jazz clubs. . . . Marlon was the prankster; if he saw we napping, he'd tie your shoelaces together. . . . But as the 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 the New School prolongation as well as got him the gig during the Roost. "I'm not the singer. What we saw me do was acting," pronounced Harry Belafonte, though he took the job for $ 70 the week singing standards similar to "Pennies From Heaven" as well as "Stardust" as well as "Skylark" as well as done his entrance corroborated by Charlie Parker, Max Roach upon drums, Tommy Potter upon bass as well as Lester Young's pianist, Al Haig 4 jazz luminaries you do the favor for the 21-year-old man they knew since he hung around the bar the lot.
He did twenty-two weeks during the Royal Roost, done the jot down which Symphony Sid promoted upon his WJZ air wave show, played the Black Orchid in Chicago as well as the Rendez-Vous Room in Philly, afterwards Caf Society in New York for more than $ 350 the week. ("I had the voic! e the th rong liked, as well as the look. . . . And for white audiences, we carried the reassuring presence, extended by my Caribbean diction. Black, though . . . not too black.") And then, in 1951, underneath the change of Paul Robeson as well as Pete Seeger as well as friends in the Village, he incited toward folk music "Shenandoah" as well as chain-gang songs as well as ballads played 3 months during the Village Vanguard, afterwards dual months during the Blue Angel upon East 55th, as well as in 1952 done his first calypso record, "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)." Seven years out of the Navy, he had the jot down deal with RCA Victor as well as an MGM movie, "Bright Road,"with Dorothy Dandridge, as well as his Las Vegas entrance during the Thunderbird, where he schooled which he could master the throng of shrill drunks by walking onstage stern-faced as well as singing during the top of his voice the chain-gang song ("timmmmbber! Lord, this timber gotta roll") as well as afterwards another, maybe the third, unsmiling, no word of greeting. "I would feel the throng flourishing tense. When during last we switched to an upbeat song as well as flashed them the first laugh we could listen to the collective sigh. . . . For the rest of the act, we could be as light as well as jokey as we wanted to be. They were mine."
Years later, expel as the mafiosi in Robert Altman's "Kansas City," Belafonte writes, "I satisfied we could fool around mean. we only had to serve which old tough streak, the a single which had pulled me out of poverty."
Garrison Keillor is the host as well as writer of "A Prairie Home Companion."
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