In contrast to the danger that lurked at home, outside on the streets of Milwaukee’s north side—with all the fun and drama of our black Happy Days setting—I got to experience elements of a relatively safe and normal childhood. Safety came in part from knowing the lay of the land and also from having a sense of its boundaries. On the north border, running east-west, was W. Capitol Drive, above which the upwardly mobile bourgeois Negroes lived—where kids’ daddies worked as professionals, some of them doctors and lawyers, others teachers, insurance men, or government workers. There in the center of the north side was our lower-income yet still industrious community—mostly working-class steel and automotive workers stuck in between the land of movin’ on up (where we all secretly aspired to live one day, though we pretended we didn’t want to be with all the nose-in-the-air folks) and the bridge to the white world at the south side, which was never to be crossed, went the unwritten law of the racial divide. One of the main arteries, running north-south, was Third Street, which was lined with some of the nicer stores like Gimbels, the Boston Store, and Brill’s, as well as the Discount Center, right at Third and North, my favorite spot for buying clothes on a budget.
A couple blocks away from where we lived at Eighth and Wright was the lively intersection of Ninth and Meineke, near where I attended Lee Street Elementary School—coincidentally a school attended by Oprah Winfrey’s sister Pat when they lived in Wisconsin—across from which was Sy’s store. A big, balding Jewish guy, Sy was one of those few splashes of white in our community—even though I didn’t know until later that being Jewish was different from being White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—and he was well liked for extending short lines of credit to regular customers like us. We also felt comfortable with the two black men who helped run the business for Sy and later bought the store from him. Henry and his son—aptly nicknamed Bulldog on account of that’s what he looked like—were great characters and contributed to the inviting atmosphere.
Sy made and sold an array of incredible-tasting food, including the best sausage I ever ate in my life, and also offered an eclectic selection of home and personal items. Whenever Momma called for “Chrissy Paul . . .” it was her vocal signal that she was going to ask me to run an errand for her to pick something up at Sy’s, anything from a can of Sweet Garrett, the snuff she loved to dip, or Day’s Work, a popular brand of chewing tobacco, to some obscure personal item that I’d never heard of before. Whatever Kotex were, I had no idea. Much as I wanted to please my mother and return with what she needed, I almost always came back with the wrong item, especially when she asked, “Chrissy Paul, go run down to Sy’s and get me some taupe stockings.” I came back with any color but taupe. Eventually she started writing notes to Sy rather than have me try to figure it out.
