‘If I’d stayed doing what I was doing, I’d have ended up dead,’ Allen Jones says.

Allen Jones, 58, now a resident of Luxembourg, visited the Patterson Houses on Wednesday.

Mott Haven Journal
Revisiting the Neighborhood He Escaped From
By SAM DOLNICK

It had been more than 30 years since Allen Jones had returned to the Bronx housing projects where he grew up, and if the neighborhood had changed dramatically, so had he.

The last time Mr. Jones had walked through the Patterson Houses in Mott Haven, heroin addicts nodded out on park benches and drug dealers held court on crowded blocks. It was a world he was comfortable in: a drug dealer himself, Mr. Jones had an ever-growing pool of customers.

While the South Bronx infamously spiraled downward into a symbol of urban decay, Mr. Jones found an unlikely escape route. It wound through Rikers Island, a New England prep school, a religious junior college in North Carolina and Europe’s professional basketball leagues, ending with a position at an internationally respected bank in Luxembourg.

“If I’d stayed doing what I was doing, I’d have ended up dead,” said Mr. Jones, now 58, wearing a sport coat and sunglasses in front of the Morris Avenue building of his childhood.

He was back in the Bronx to promote his new book on his circuitous life, “The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir”, published by Fordham University Press. The memoir paints an earthy picture of the neighborhood in the 1950s, when the projects were home to working-class black and Latino families who pushed their children to excel, through the 1970s.

Standing 6 feet 6 inches tall, Mr. Jones strolled down the Mott Haven sidewalk this week, never mind the cane and the back, stiff from a recent surgery. He pointed out the window he nearly fell from as a toddler, and the corner “where we talked about each others’ mothers.”

He said he was taken aback at how much things had changed. The “hustler” basketball court where he learned to play — a hard foul meant a punch in the face — had been replaced with a shiny new jungle gym. Grass had regrown in the lawns he remembered as patches of dirt and trash. His parents and his younger brother had died, and his two sisters, whom he rarely spoke to, had moved away.

But Mr. Jones was also surprised, and dismayed, at all that had not changed.

“You’re not the Allen Jones from 281?” asked a weathered man in his 40s who recognized the well-dressed visitor. The men hugged and caught up on old acquaintances, most of whom Mr. Jones hadn’t heard from in decades. “We need people like you in the neighborhood!” the man shouted as he walked away.

Mr. Jones shook his head, rattled. “He had no teeth!” he said. “That kid had so much promise, and look what happened to him.” If not for his lucky breaks, Mr. Jones said, “that could be me.”

When Mr. Jones’s parents moved from Harlem to the Patterson Houses in the early 1950s, it was a step toward middle-class stability. Patterson, one of the first public housing projects in the Bronx, offered working families a refuge from the dangers of street life, said Professor Mark D. Naison, a professor of African and African-American studies and history at Fordham University and co-writer of Mr. Jones’s memoir.

The Patterson Houses, and the rest of the South Bronx, began to change in the 1960s when drugs and crime flooded the streets and middle-class families fled. Mr. Jones’s father, a taxi driver, could not afford to leave, but with a reputation for being the toughest man in the Patterson Houses, he was rarely given a hard time.

Gar Paige, a longtime family friend who recently turned 98, said the elder Mr. Jones was so strong, “I’d rather he shoot me than hit me.”

Despite his strict father, Mr. Jones gravitated toward the streets, enticed by the money, the drugs, the girls, the parties. “I was selling death to anybody who wanted to die, and people were buying,” he writes in his book.

He also made a habit of robbing people, and when he was finally arrested in 1969 at age 18, he said, he was charged with five armed robberies and possession of a deadly weapon. He faced 10 to 25 years in prison, but because of a merciful judge, he writes in the book, he was released from Rikers Island on probation after just three months.

From there, Mr. Jones began treating basketball as his escape. He trained with local legends like Nathaniel Archibold, better known as Tiny, and earned a basketball scholarship at a Massachusetts prep school — which, to his Bronx eyes, looked like “a summer camp for rich kids.”

He did well there, then later bounced from a junior college in North Carolina to Roanoke College in Virginia, and then to Europe, where he played for professional basketball teams in France and Luxembourg. He did not trust himself to return to the Bronx. “Europe was not only my opportunity,” he writes. “It was my salvation.”

He went on to have a successful career with the Amicale Steinsel team in Luxembourg, where he was a player and a coach. Using the name Daddy Cool, he was also a radio D.J. for an English-language station in Luxembourg.

After a chance meeting at a nightclub in the 1980s, Mr. Jones landed a job as a driver for a French bank in Luxembourg. He was quickly promoted into the banking department, where he learned the business and forged a career, he writes. While he was studying exchange rates, a crack epidemic swept through Mott Haven, taking many of Mr. Jones’s former friends with it.

He worked in banking for 27 years, the last 17 at the Luxembourg subsidiary of Dexia, a bank that operates principally in France, Belgium, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. He retired in 2006 and still lives in Luxembourg, where he has an apartment with a terrace overlooking the village he has made his home.

Along the way, he married and had two children. What would they make of the Patterson Houses?

Mr. Jones shook his head. “They would be culture shocked,” he said. “It would be hard for them here. They’re not used to drama.”

"It Takes a Village to Write a Book" Panelists: Angela O'Donnell, Mark Naison, and Allen Jones

Last Thursday, Allen Jones, author of The Rat That Got Away and co-author, Mark Naison, Ph.D., Professor of History and African-American Studies, participated in a panel discussion on the writing of The Rat That Got Away at Fordham University. The lecture was sponsored by the Center for Catholic Studies and the Bronx African American History Project.  To Read more, visit the Fordham American Studies Blog.

Upcoming events:

• Tuesday, October 6: Lecture and Book Signing for Harlem RBI, Youth Organization in Harlem, New York
• Thursday, October 8: Lecture and Book Signing at CUNY Prep, a high school in the Bronx
• Friday,October 9: Lecture and Book Signing at The Bronx Museum of the Arts 
  

  The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Visit the FUP website for more information on upcoming events.

On Friday morning, September 25, at 7:30 AM, Allen Jones, author of The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir , joined me for a visit to PS 140, a Bronx school I have worked with for the last four years, where a group of teachers wanted to meet with us to discuss the book.

For Allen and me, the visit was a profoundly moving experience.

First of all, to see a group of 20 teachers gathered for a book group at 7:30 AM on a Friday morning, all of whom had read the book cover to cover, said something very powerful about the culture of PS 140 as well as about the appeal of The Rat That Got Away.  In a school where the principal is often in the building 7 days a week, teachers think nothing to being in the building early in the morning or late into the night to enhance their own professional development or do something that might benefit their students or the larger school community. Allen and I looked at the faces of the teachers assembled, mostly women, mostly ( but not all) Black and Latino, and clearly, from their affect and conversation, people who had grown up in the city, and felt a twinge of anxiety along with the excitement. Would they like the book? Would the find it true to life? Would they feel it captured their experience and the experience of the young people they worked with every day?

After I gave a brief introduction thanking the teachers for coming, and explaining how the book was written, I asked the teachers what they thought of the book urging them to be completely honest and not worry if what they said offended us. What followed left us humbled, gratified, and deeply moved. The first teacher to speak, Mary Dixon Lake, herself a published poet and children’s book author, said the book brought to life the world of her child hood in Bedford Stuyvesant and said that20Allen’s portrait of his father captured the aura of power and respect inspired by her own father and that of many of the Black fathers she grew up around. Another teacher, Pam Lewis, said that even though she grew up in another Bronx Housing project (Edenwald rather than Patterson) twenty five years later than Allen, his description of the sights and sounds and smells of the project grounds when he went to church at 8 on a Sunday morning was exactly how she remember her trips to church during her own childhood. Another teacher came forward to praise the books language, saying that she appreciated how well Allen captured the way people in the street spoke, saying it was the first book about the Bronx, much less the city, where the language of the main characters was wholly believable and authentic.

But the most powerful moment in the morning came when Mike Napolitano, a teacher in the school who had grown up in the Patterson Houses and whose older brothers knew and played ball with Allen said “That was me! That was us.” Echoing Allen, he described project halls so clean that he could get on his hands and knees and push model cars through them, people who trusted their neighbors so much that they left their doors open all day, and people of all races and nationalities who were in and out of each others apartments, eating one another’s food, listening to one another’s music and building friendships that crossed racial lines. He went on to praise Allen for giving recognition to all the coaches and community center directors who worked with neighborhood youth, saying “ I played for them too” and then laughingly affirmed the accuracy of Allen’s depiction of the stores where hustlers and wannabee hustlers bought their clothes, pulling out a photograph of one of his older brothers in a Bly shop shirt! As Mike spoke , and as he and Allen nodded in mutual appreciation of their shred experience, his fellow teachers looked at Mike with new eyes, and with new respect, as they realized that the stories he had always been telling everyone about life in “the Patterson” , even though he was an Italian American in his mid 40=E 2s,20were all true! By the end of the discussion, he and Allen hugging each other like long lost brothers, sharing phone numbers and making arrangements to visit a 97 year old basketball mentor named Mr.  Page who still alive, lucid and living on the Grand Concourse.

After the book group ended, with hugs and photos and promises by Allen to return to the school, principal Cannon took us up to Mike Napolitano’s classroom, where he was using The Rat That Got Away, to promote literacy, reading skills and an understanding of local history in his class of 4th grade boys. The class was part of Principal Cannon’s experiment in creating optional boys and girls classes in the upper grades of his school and Mike was using Allen Jones, which was rooted in Bronx neighborhoods his students grew up in, to get his boys excited about books and reading.

The physical appearance of the classroom blew Allen and me away. On the walls were three large posters which had Allen’ s book broken down year by year, with descriptions of important events taking place in the country as well as important events in Allen’s life. To see the book broken down that way in a 4th grade classroom was just incredible- neither of us, in our wildest dreams, ever imagined the book being used that way. Then while we looked at the display, the boys in the class came up to use, holding notebooks and pieces of papers, and asked us for our autographs. We took about five minutes signing the materials offered for every boy in the class and then sat in chairs while Mike Napolitano had the boys sit on a carpet at our feet and ask us questions.

When the question period began it became clear that the boys knew Allen’s story down to the minutest detail , showing a particular fascination for his drug, prison and basketball experiences. “Was your name in prison really Youngblood?” one boy asked. “Are there scars where you injected drugs?” another boy chimed in. “Did you hurt your hand when you dunked” a third boy said. “Who was the Whiz Kid ( a famous Harlem drug dealer Allen referred to in one of his chapters)? a fourth boy wanted to know. At least fifteen of the boys raise their hands and the discussion only ended, after more than thirty minutes, when Principal Cannon told us we had to leave. The enthusiasm of these boys about the contents of the book just overwhelmed us. Clearly, the stories Allen told touched a chord with these young people in a way know book they had been assigned in school had ever done. When Allen had to leave he called the boys together, asked them to put their hands in a circle, count to three and chant “I am some-body.” They did exactly as Allen asked and SCREAMED the words out so loud the windows almost broke.

Allen and I left the classroom and the school feeling something truly extraordinary had taken place.  A book we had written had validated the lives of teachers who were working in a South Bronx school and had given one teacher a vehicle for creating excitement about books and learning among a class of fourth grade boys. No television interview about the book or review in a major media outlet could match the feeling we had after spending a morning at PS 140. This is exactly what we wrote this book for!

Shannon Holmes, best-selling author of "Never Go Home Again"

The writing style of The Rat that Got Away drew me into the book from the first chapter. Allen Jones and Mark Naison paint a vivid portrait leaving nothing to the imagination. This book allows you to journey into the street life from the safety of your own home. This is a must read for any fan or urban literature. Real people in Real life situations. It don’t get no realer than this.
—Shannon Holmes