CHAPTER 8
When I am fourteen years old, my mother moves us out of Oakland, north across the freeway to Berkeley. She’s trying to straighten out her life and get away from the crowd she runs with.
This is the first time in my young life that I am away from the constant loving atmosphere that surrounds Mama. Even though she and Daddy live only ten miles away, I feel as though I have been shoved out of the nest.
So what do I do? I try desperately to find that same level of love elsewhere—and that’s when I discover a truth that changes my life. I find out that applause equals love.
I become the hambone king of Berkeley, California. It’s a popular song and a dance craze at the time.
That year, 1955, a lot of bands, both white and black, come out with versions of the hambone song, which is basically an old minstrel tune with a lot of different variations. “Hambone, hambone, have you heard? Papa’s gonna buy me a mockingbird.”
More than anything, hambone is a beat, done with palms hitting your chest or leg: slap-lacka-lacka-slap-slap. The Milwaukee drummer Red Saunders and his orchestra have a hit with his version, the whiter-than-white Bell Sisters, too, and the country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford. Everybody is doing it. Later on, Bo Diddley takes it over and makes it rock and roll. Johnny Otis’s rock hit “Willie and the Hand Jive” is just another version of the song.
All the local movie theaters have hambone dance contests before the shows. Grand prize, ten dollars, sometimes fifteen or twenty-five.
My best friends, Brother and Sammy, get me up onstage for the first time at the Oakland Paramount when we get to the theater early for the matinee one Saturday afternoon. I still recall the feature: Mister Roberts with Henry Fonda.
“Sign up, kids!” announces the movie emcee. “Dance for the prize!”
“Come on, Mooney,” Sammy says. “I seen you do it. You can win!”
I know I can hambone with the best of them. You pop your fingers and twist out your knees. I hear that beat in the cradle. I’ve been doing hambone for Mama since I learn how to walk. Nobody’s got anything on me.
So I get up onstage at the Oakland Paramount and win the whole contest.
I don’t realize it back then, but the hambone is juba, a slave rhythm brought from West Africa. The reason they slap their bodies is that the masters don’t allow them to have drums. Too dangerous. The darkies might be passing messages to one another. They might be plotting to kill us in our sleep. No drums allowed.
There are just a few hundred kids in the Paramount audience that afternoon, and a lot of popcorn flying around, and not everybody is paying attention, but I’m bitten by the performance bug, and bitten good.
Applause is love. I’m up there, and I know it. I feel that the audience is loving me, they are with me all the way, with Sammy laughing and the faces of the girls in the front row shining up at me.
Slap-lacka-lacka-slap-slap.
It all starts at that moment.
I like the way the sawbuck feels in my hand when the emcee slips me the first-prize money afterward. I like the way people look at me when I come off the stage. I like Brother and Sammy pounding me on the back, celebrating my triumph.
I like it all. I want to do it again and again. But the lights in the theater go down, the movie starts, and Henry Fonda comes on the screen. To this day, I hate that movie, Mister Roberts.
We all go to Luther Burbank Junior High in Berkeley. Sammy, Brother, and I laugh about Luther Burbank’s last words: “I don’t feel good.” We are always saying that to one another and then fake dying. Even though the students are mostly white, the school has a few black teachers, so I feel comfortable there.
The Monday after I win the hambone contest, I can tell my popularity in school has skyrocketed. Students, especially girls, talk about me in the halls. I see my path in life. I will be the Hambone King. Brother and Sammy act as my managers. They scout around for movie theaters holding hambone contests. We go to the Orinda, the Shattuck, the California, and the Oaks. Sometimes Sammy and Brother come up onstage and back me up. We have a routine.
I always win, time after time. Brother, Sammy, and I get real excited. We’re going to make thousands of dollars by taking our act out on the road. We plot our moves in my bedroom at the 18th Street house in Oakland. We’re going to run away from home. We think we’re doing our secret planning on the downlow, but of course, Mama knows all, sees all.
“Circus broke down, did you hear?” she says casually, as we come downstairs to the kitchen to raid the fridge.
“Yeah?” I say, cautious. Something’s up, I can tell from Mama’s tone.
“Black panther escaped,” she says.
“A panther?” Sammy says. His eyes go wide.
“You know why they call ’em black panthers, don’t you?” Mama says. “Them cats just loves to eat young black children.”
Brother and Sammy stare at her. I laugh nervously. “Mama, you’re joking us!”
“Yum,” Mama says, smacking her lips. “Tasty black kids.”
By unspoken agreement, Brother, Sammy, and I immediately abandon our plans to leave home. We decide it’s better to stay right where we are.
It turns out I don’t have to go anywhere. Fame, celebrity, and show business come to hunt me down where I live.