Blow them up and believe it or not it was good money, but boy I hated
doing that. I hated the big Afro because it was too time consuming.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You had to really pay attention to details to do that
kind of work. I can still do it, but all that hair man, and just trying
to, the effect that you want, you want this guy, give him a nice style,
and he wants to go out looking like that, but he wants to wake up in the
morning looking like that too. So you actually had to cut it like that
where he lay his head on the pillow when he wakes up in the morning, it
springs back. You just comb it out, and it's just like it was when he
left the barbershop. That was kind of cool.
Then my father, I owe everything to my father, man. It isn't anything in
this world because I've been in the Army, and I've learned a lot of
things, but initially my mother and father they put what's in here now
today, and I thank them so dearly for it, and West Broad Street now. I'm
going to tell you right now, I learned a lot from the street here. Some
things you can learn in school, but there are some things out here you
can't learn in school. You can't learn that. The things I learn out
here. What I learned out on West Broad Street prior to eighteen years
old helped me when I left Savannah, Georgia, how to deal with people
socially. The only thing I couldn't really, really deal with a lot my
first time away was white people because I never dealt with white people
before. See now white people
Page 15are more or less
unforgiving in a sense like what the hell he saying. What the hell you
come from? What are you talking about? Seemed like everybody else and
them understand why in the hell can't you understand what I'm saying.
It's crazy, and then I had a couple of friends, one white guy,
befriended me. His name was Jerry Gillespie from Pennsylvania, and he
loved to play soccer. I didn't know anything about soccer. I haven't
heard about soccer. We were roommates, and I just, I tell Jerry straight
up now I said, "Jerry I was talking a white guy one day and something I
said and the white guy said that guy looked kind of stupid and didn't
understand why he called me stupid. I thought I was talking, I really
wasn't talking that much, just a regular conversation." Jerry explained
it to me. He said, "Leroy, it's not that you're stupid. It's just that
they don't understand you because they haven't been around black guys."
Then that's what really cracked it for me right there. I said, "Okay now
I understand that." In other words we both have to feel each other out
in order to be something together. But I learned it right here on West
Broad Street, everything I learned. Everything that took me on my
travels around the world, got it right here.