Photo by Barry Houlehen
Riverwest - Bremen Street
How well I remember the first time I heard the word “spook” aside from some 1940s Abbott and Costello or Bowery Boys movie comedy. And I didn’t laugh. No way. More on this later.
Back in the day, me and my young friends in town delighted in good naturedly scaring the living daylights out of the unwary. And sometimes, even the very, very, wary.
Indeed, all of us recall those special late October days and nights. Parties, jack-o-lanterns, bobbing for apples, skeleton suits, ghostly white sheets, masks and tricks or treats. Great, good fun and great, mostly good memories on fright night.
Homemade Halloween
We donned inexpensive, homemade disguises to milk the generosity of our integrated Near North Side neighborhood the night before Halloween we called “Beggars Night.” In tattered rags in keeping with its theme, we went door-to-door yelping “Halloween Handout” instead of “Trick or Treat.” And the results usually were goodies, goodies and more goodies.
But there always was a chance a grouchy white adult would shoo us away or even douse us with water. This occasionally happened when the resident cared less about Halloween and hated answering an incessantly ringing doorbell.
One Beggars Night, me and five of my 10-year-old friends approached a big corner house and walked up a long flight of steep, stone steps. Suddenly, warm water from above drenched us, causing panic unlike anything I’d experienced.
Wildly jumping and screaming, we took off in all directions as a white-sounding voice from behind laughingly rang out: “Will you look at the little spooks scamper!” This made us run even faster.
Slowing down about a block away, my best buddy, Melvin, grabbed me by the arm and panted: “I told you we shouldn’t try that house. White folks live there.” And to this day, I can recall my reply: “Yeah, but why did he call us spooks”? Why, indeed.
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If we only knew then what we have come to know since. But what can you expect from black, 10-year-olds naive enough to rub burnt cork on our faces in place of traditional Halloween masks?
Civics Lesson
In the 1950s, I reacted in similar fashion when white teachers discussed the embarrassing (to most black kids) subjects of slavery in the South, Stepin Fetchit in movies, Negro History Week and Brown vs. Board of Education in civics class.
In the midst of white and black pupils, I’d slouch down in my seat hoping beyond hope I wouldn’t be called on to recite. It was like a bad dream for me—like Halloween and “spooks” all over again.
As I grew older, I realized most teachers were just doing their jobs. And some whites called us “spook,” “spade, “coon” and worse to mask their own feelings of inferiority, jealousy or lack of self-confidence. Their “masks,” which they didn’t limit to Halloween, were a way of life for many. They were determined to “spook” us, and keep us “spooks,” in their bigoted minds.
And then the 1960s arrived and black in America became beautiful. Soon, afros and cornrow braids—staples of the black experience for centuries—sprouted on the heads of white folks. And the mop-top Beatles in England tried to sing like Frankie Lymon, moan like Muddy Waters, do falsetto like the El Dorados and Earl Lewis and play guitar like Chuck Berry.
Copycats
Never hearing the real thing, naïve young whites loved these copycats while most blacks laughed at them. Pat Boone and other inferior “talents” covered black hit records at the expense of greats such as Chuck Jackson, Hank Ballard, La Vern Baker, Little Richard, Ruth Brown, The Moonglows, Spaniels and Temptations. But that’s a story for another time.
Further distancing ourselves from white-oriented Halloween, things blackened up for us in the 1970s with Richard Roundtree’s Shaft, Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown and other red-hot so-called “Blaxploitation” films. We loved ‘em.
Then came 1980, and candidate Ronald Reagan—debating President Jimmy Carter on national television in Cleveland—exclaimed “…when I was a boy and America didn’t know it had a racial problem.” Uh-huh.
And once again, in my adult mind, I heard that laughing, taunting, white voice on a long-ago Beggar’s Night: “Will you look at those little spooks scamper!”
Fast forward to now and ask yourself—despite Barack Obama’s presidency—if certain things in America have really changed all that much. Think about it. Anyway, Happy Halloween 2021 to all my hometown friends.
