The Whittler

He'll still drive back to the old apartment, 17th and Ellsworth, trying to make sense of it all. He'll park his ear and just sit there. He'll stare at the first-floor garage where his stepfather. Sylvester Chancy, made him wash cars all weekend, waking him at 5:30 a.m. and working him till 8 p.m. for 75 cents a day, making him start the whole car over if he missed one spot. He'll stare up at the second-floor flat that was so cold in winter, you had to go outside to warm up.

How? he keeps asking himself. How did he ever get out of where? He'll stare up at the front room where the old man would sit, late on Friday nights, the beer melting away his glacial silence, the anger at life leaking out of him; up at the kitchen, where his mother would cook black-eyed peas with hog jowls, cracking jokes, singing spirituals that turned to spitfire if you were home a minute late; up at the little back room, where the rats scuttled and the three kids slept and he would cry in bed when the Brooklyn Dodgers lost or when another Christmas passed without his getting the one gift he always asked for. Where in that apartment did the innocence come from to make a teenager cry when a team lost a ball game, to make a 16-year-old keep writing to Santa Claus and asking for a bike? Where? He'll stare at the front door and see himself pausing just before going inside, steeling himself for the whipping his stepfather is going to give him for playing basketball again. Survival, that's all the old man's head had room for. How many more years will it take for John to understand that mulish refusal to bend, to know what a black man must become sometimes in order not to turn tail and flee?

He'll blink and see himself walking back out that front door on that evening in 1951, the shoulders of his stepfather's zoot suit sloping off John's skinny shoulders, the too-long pant legs licking at the cement, the necktie wide as a bib, on his way to the Warwick Hotel to receive the award as Philadelphia's Public League MVP. See himself crouching in the toilet stall that night while everyone searches for him to pose in the banquet room for the Ail-Star photo, see himself climbing up on the toilet seat so his feet can't be seen beneath the stall door, hunching lower, ashamed of his clothes, holding his breath. Holding it like the secret his aunt whispered when he was a teenager, that he's somebody else's son. the secret he would keep behind his teeth all his life so his brother and sister would die not knowing, so John wouldn't feel even more alone.

He'll sit there in his car and feel his hands squeeze the steering wheel, and then the tears trickling down his cheeks. He'll rub his eyes and slowly drive away.

"I found mistrust when I came north. I found evil. But then I found basketball, and all the fear and evil didn't matter, because I was going past them to play basketball." That's how he talks, in pulpit words, pulpit rhythms; God still wonders how He missed him.

John crossed two gang boundaries to reach Ben Franklin High each day, lunched on one-cent bags of cookie crumbs swollen by long swallows of water. Sam Browne, the basketball coach there, saw him playing ball one day early in his sophomore year, saw the dark ferocity and urged him to try (Hit for the team. Beat John for a layup? He would tackle you. "I mean that literally," says Johnny Sample, the old New York Jet All-Pro, who played in recreation leagues with Chancy. "He tackled me when I tried to beat him with the same move twice. John is the most competitive human being I've ever seen."

"All that anger in him," says his old friend, Claude Gross, "it came out in his playing. John commanded the floor. The ball was his. He used to take a tray from the catering service he worked for, load it with cups and dishes, spin the tray on the finger of one hand and dribble a ball with the other. If he were coming along today, they'd have to pay him however many millions they just gave Anfernee Hardaway, because that's how good John was."

He got nothing. The hornet was humming right inside the Big Five's nostrils; the Big Five couldn't feel it, couldn't hear it, couldn't see it. The hornet was black—and born live years too soon, before Hal Lear's and Guy Rodgers's success at Temple in the mid and late '50s began busting down the walls for blacks there and at La Salle. Villanova, St. Joseph's and Penn as well. "MVP of the city, and nobody called," he says.

He stood outside the half-built Veterans Hospital one day in 1951, his high school coach, Browne, at his side, peering up at his stepfather on the steel girders. John kind of, sort of, had a scholarship offer from a tiny black college in Daytona Beach, Fla., of which he knew nothing. A Philly kid at Bethune-Cookman had lipped the coach to this monster of a guard from his hometown...but would the tight-lipped carpenter let his stepson go? Browne called up to the old man, pleading. The old man slowly climbed down. Basketball...college...how did either put dinner on the table? And then a grunt. They took it for a yes.

John climbed onto the train carrying a cardboard suitcase and a couple of sandwiches. In Washington he and the other blacks were herded into jim crow cars for the rest of the trip south. He sat there, exhilarated at departing, terrified of arriving, the world rushing past his window, the train hurtling him back toward Black Bottom. The solution was simple and hard and cold, insistent as the clack of the wheels. A child is born. A game becomes his sole source of significance, his offering. His real dad never knows of it. His stepfather spurns it. His society snubs it. He can accept that judgment and let his head sag, as gravity and the motion of the train want it to, as the heads of many in the jim crow car do. Or he can stiffen his neck and brace his head, become his own judge and jury, his own scorekeeper...become alone.