“Geese, Eric, that’s great advice. Makes me feel so much more relaxed.”

“Don’t look down, Wyles. Don’t look down.”

Rat and I were clinging to the stair handles on the outside of a box car a couple hundred feet over the Mississippi as the train crawled into a switching yard in St. Louis. From one side of the river to the other it probably took five minutes. Didn’t seem like five minutes. Seemed like half my twenty year old life on that August day in 1964. The summer when Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Murdered by a sheriff and his band of Klan thugs. Rat and I were headed for Jackson, the capital, where the voter registration in the state was being coordinated.

When we jumped off the box car in the switching yard, a railroad cop in a suit lumbered up out of nowhere. Told us we weren’t welcome on his property. Said he wouldn’t arrest us if we left the premises forthwith. All that sticks out clearly more than fifty years later. What sticks out even more is what I’d seen on the other side of the river before I got the shit scared out of me crossing over it. East St. Louis, Illinois.

Hovel after hovel rolling past us for a mile or more, like the ones you see in movies of Africa. All the faces were black, etched with a gloom that looked like nothing could ever wipe it away.

That was the moment I cast off the views of my parents, the views that would drive them to vote for Barry Goldwater in November. The moment that launched my voyage towards the Apollo.

I was a white boy from suburban Connecticut. Went to an all-white boarding school and then on to Amherst College in the fall of 1962. There were only two guys of color in my all male class of 300. The only real exposure I had gotten to black people before that Mississippi trip was through my father, who had grown up in South Carolina before leaving it for good in 1928. He was a racist, through and through. But I somehow realized that, inside, he was an old black man sitting in front of a barbecue pit telling “lies” to anyone who would listen. He was Richard Pryor’s “Mudbone.” Shortly before his death decades later, I whispered in his ear, “Remember, Dad, you only think you’re a white man.” He cackled and nodded his agreement.

Once we were in Jackson I got a sense of the Jim Crow south that television news clips could not convey. I sat in a one room school house for black children with no indoor plumbing and thought about “all deliberate speed.” I looked down from the balcony of a Baptist church filled with black people and one white woman, all holding hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” I stood next to a kid from up north as two black cops strolled by us on the street. When I asked him how that could be, he said, “They can’t arrest white people.”

All too soon I was back in the upper middle-class, over-educated world of New England. The contrast of the poverty and backwardness of Mississippi with this burnished environment unsettled me for months. Maybe it started to ebb when Lyndon Johnson finally prevailed in an election I was still not old enough to vote in. What did not ebb at all was my fascination with people who are now called African American. (Then the term was “negro.”) I wanted to hear Motown and The Rolling Stones, who understood the music from the delta. I wanted to apologize to every black person I met for the wrongs my ancestors had heaped upon them. If you had pressed me, I might have said I wanted to be black. Why not? An old man from Louisiana had told me, “Boy, you be a n—- on Saturday night, you never wanta be white again.”

I was now into my junior year. The bad decision to go straight from high school to college was nipping at my heels. Pushed along by depression over a lacrosse injury and getting dumped by my first true love, I got thrown out of school. It was either get drafted or join the Marines. I did the latter. Just before going off to Parris Island, I met up with Rat in New York City. He was starting law school at Rutgers.

One hundred twenty fifth street and St. Nicholas Avenue in October of 1965. Saturday for the midnight show. Joe Tex, Slappy White, and the best sound system I’d ever heard. All in a sea of black people sprinkled with caucasian faces like Rat’s and my own.

Save driving drunk through a red light on a motorcycle at over 100 mph, that was the best time I’d ever had so far in a life that should never have lasted this long. Okay, but then going back a few weeks later for the gospel show before Christmas? Way better than the first time, and better than the motorcycle near miss.

Those were my first two acts at the Apollo. The intermission between the second and the third was stretched out. A stint in the Marine Corps, night school courses, and the support of a great professor had convinced the administration stuffed shirts at Amherst to let me back again.

Now it was January of 1968 just before the start of second semester. I was in the lower reaches of Manhattan with my girlfriend Noel and a couple about our age from the south. A white couple. Very nice, very polite. And I was bored out of my skull.

About 10:30 and well on my way to advanced inebriation, it hit me. Wilson Pickett, said the Village Voice, was playing the midnight show at the Apollo. Noel and the southern couple did not find my idea inspired. They were understandably concerned about safety. Had they been of coarser ilk, they might have chorused: “You crazy, boy. No way we draggin’ our white asses up to be in the middle of that many black folks, many of whom would delight in doing us serious bodily harm.”

But their civility and my enthusiasm prevailed and hop into a cab we did. When I told the driver our destination and why we were headed there, he hesitated for a beat and said, “Okay-y-y.”

At the box office we were told the only remaining seats where we could sit together were in the balcony. The balcony at the Apollo was not a hospitable place for someone with my fear of heights. My previous times in the theater I had sat up there. Whenever I had stood to stomp and cheer, my stomach had knotted at the image of being pushed from behind. Then summersaulting down the rows of seats in front of me. Then tumbling over the lip and plummeting onto the heads of patrons forty feet below.

Once the music started, all my concerns about falling and about the uneasiness of Noel and the couple evaporated. It was show time! And the great man, Mr. Wilson Pickett, did not disappoint. Not from the ever so predictable first moment when he strutted out onto the stage right up until the most unpredictable ending.

We were forty minutes into the spectacle when Wilson finished up with a version of “Mustang Sally” the likes of which I’d never heard before. Even my white friends were hollering and making a fuss like they were regular dues paying members of the congregation. Wilson waited a minute or two for all of us to settle down. Then he pointed out into the audience and said, “Come on up here, brother. I wanta talk to you.”

I didn’t expect that. But then again, the Apollo had its roots in Vaudeville; and Vaudeville had a habit of throwing curves at the audience. That was cool. Anyway, this skinny guy sort of bebops his way up onto the stage and he and Wilson exchange an elaborate handshake. Then the “signifying” starts up. I don’t hear that expression anymore, but when I mention it to black people over 60, they nod their heads and chuckle.

Here’s a smidgeon of what we heard for ten minutes:

“Well, I’m a better black American than you are, brother.”

“That right? You from down south?”

“No Jim, I’m from Chicago.”

“Oh shit. Chicago. Boy, you don’t know nothing about being black. Nothing. Damn, you can even eat at the same counter with white folks in Chicago. Try that in Alabama, son. See what happens. Be lucky they don’t lynch your skinny ass, young blood.”

“You a sorry old Tom. That’s what you are. We gotta movement going on in this country and you talking about letting crackers shove you around …”

It all sounded pretty authentic. But, I’m thinking, no this is a bit. This is part of the show. Then the signifying ends, and the skinny guy disappears back into the audience.

Great, now we can get back to what we came for. Nope. Wilson puts his hands on his hips, stares out at all of us, and yells, “You know what? I don’t like some cat come up on the stage and bust up my gig.” Then he turns to his right and storms off and I’m thinking, “Mr. Pickett, ah, I believe it was you who invited the gentleman to join you.” Perhaps Wilson had forgotten that fact.

For 30 seconds or so there’s this uneasy silence. Then the curtain comes down. Then that silence turns into an ever increasing roar. I look up behind us and see these three full-figured women jumping up and down on their seats. And they are major pissed: “I want my money back. I want my muthafuckin’ money back. I ain’t leavin’ ’til I get my muthafuckin’ money back.”

I look over at Noel and the couple. They are beyond terrified. I whisper, “I beg to differ with those young ladies. I think we’ve gotten more than our money’s worth. Let’s go.” They offer no objection to my idea and we shuffle as best we can out of our seats and up the balcony stairs. Now we’re headed down some stairs towards the theater exit, accompanied by a swarm of black people who are not focused on us. They are focused on the studious looking young man with the Coke bottle glasses in the ticket booth. And he is sorely afraid. We bypass the young man and head out the exit.

As we hit the cold January air, a tall dude is leaning against the building smoking a cigar. “What happen?” he asks. “Show end early?”

“Nope,” I say. “Wilson walked off the stage.”

“Oh, shit-t-t. He do that again?”

Years later a friend asked me if I’d ever go back.

“No way.”

“Nah. Just be a let down.”

” Too dangerous?”

“Yeah, it would.”