Topic: Pee Wee Wilson
The Passing of a Small Man
Sometimes the deaths of “unimportant” people can leave huge gaps in the social and cultural fabric of our community
By J.B. Borders
William Joseph Wilson was 80 years old when he died on February 11, 2008. A waiter for much of his adult life, Wilson was not the kind of person who would rate an obituary in either the white-owned media or the black press. He was just one of the thousands of low-wage hospitality workers serving wealthier, more accomplished patrons daily in the city’s hotels, restaurants and convention center.
William Wilson left no heirs to carry on his name, just his wife of 45 years, Adele. He wasn’t particularly religious or civic-minded. The nature of his work rendered him virtually invisible to those he served. As a result, he learned to live his life mostly below the radar of social recognition. Mostly, but not entirely. In certain arenas, William Wilson was highly visible, a colorful character, a New Orleans original and one of the last of a dying breed.
Wilson was copper-colored, barrel-chested and had leathery skin toughened by hours in the sun. He was less than five feet tall and noticeably bowlegged. Those latter characteristics accounted for his nickname, Pee Wee. I called him Mr. Pee Wee since I was more than 20 years his junior. We played tennis on weekends off and on for more than 25 years, mostly at a public facility now known as the Atkinson/Stern Tennis Center.
Mr. Pee Wee was a terrible tennis player but a great student of the game. He knew its history and the styles of its great players. He knew the right way to hit all the shots. He understood the fine points of the game’s strategy, the best equipment to use and the most effective training techniques.
Still, he couldn’t play worth a lick. It wasn’t due to his lack of height or his advanced age. Nor did he lack competitive spirit. He played hard and he wanted to win. His stamina was also decent for someone in his age group. Much as he loved the game, he just didn’t have a talent for hitting the ball consistently. He couldn’t stay focused and maintain his concentration. His mind was always racing ahead to something else. And that was okay with him because he realized where his true gifts lay – talking trash and hustling to survive.
The Atkinson/Stern Tennis Center, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and has yet to be restored, is not just a tennis facility. It’s also a social center. And the regular players there are part of an extended network of friends and acquaintances who joke and tease each other and exchange views on current events.
In other words, it’s a barbershop without razors – and its peanut gallery is as much an attraction as the play on the courts. That’s where Mr. Pee Wee came to life. He was the chief smack talker, instigator, aggravator and, frequently, the center of attention. There, he was fully visible and triumphant. He didn’t come to play tennis, he came to talk trash. Moreover, he relished nothing more than showing off his knowledge and getting under someone’s skin or into their head with some bit of foolishness.
He was impish, certainly. But he was also a skilled provocateur. His wind-up would generally begin with an innocent-seeming question: “Say, man, let me ask you something.” And he’d proceed to bring up some topic in the news. Embedded in his question, however, was a position he had already staked out and was prepared to defend, sometimes just to be contrary to the prevailing sentiment: “What made O.J. think he could kill that white woman and get away with it?” or “How much money you think Clinton is paying to support his black child?”
Any reply provided an opening for him to launch into an extended riff on the topic. His disquisition was usually humorous and caustic and would trigger additional comments, disagreements and a broadening circle of participants.
If you weren’t in the conversation, he would drag you into it. He’d call you by name, “Did you hear what so and so just said? Tell him he’s out of his mind.” And you’d be snared. “What you mean, you ain’t in this? You scared to hurt his feelings and tell him the truth? Or is you crazy, too?”
It didn’t matter if you were trying to play a match on the courts or watching a game on television in the lounge. If you were anywhere in the tennis center, you were fair game.
Also no matter where the conversation began, before it was over Pee Wee would find an opening to throw in his standard zingers about the state of the race: “The only thing a black man wants is a white woman and a pork chop fried hard, hard, hard.” “Everywhere you live is a ghetto, I don’t care how much the houses cost.” “The white man won’t let a Negro go but so far in this country. If you don’t like it, you can take your ass back to Africa and run your own country.”
“I know these things,” he would always say, “because I seen it for myself” or “because I reads aplenty, all kinds of things.” His larger point was that we all need to be better informed and we need to do more thinking for ourselves.
Of course, Pee Wee didn’t have much formal education. He started out in some small, nondescript agricultural hamlet upriver from New Orleans. By the time he was 13, he was on his own, “hustling,” he would say, to take care of himself.
He made his way to the city, shined shoes at first, then stumbled into the world of horse racing. He was a stable boy and a groom and then a personal attendant to a wealthy horse-owning family. For years, he told me, he traveled the racing circuit, from New Orleans to Lexington to Saratoga and all the stops in between.
He got an up-close view of how the rich lived and played. He learned their tastes and habits, their strengths and foibles, their power and reach. He also learned how to comport himself in their world, to anticipate their needs and to stay clear of their furies. He learned that the world was run ultimately by people who used their minds and not their hands. That suited him fine. He was small in stature, not built for a lifetime of hard manual labor. He committed himself to developing his mind even though he knew he was consigned by fate never to amass any substantial wealth or power.
When he met his beloved Adele, he gave up life on the road and settled for jobs in the city’s tourist zone. Then as now, most waiters and servants barely earned a living wage, so Pee Wee developed sideline ventures to augment his income. He bet on horses and fights, he played dice and cards for money, he performed odd jobs at every opportunity. He couldn’t be idle. He was always looking for the chance to earn some extra cash. By the time I met him, that was an ingrained part of his personality.
One year I gave Pee Wee a pair of complementary tickets to the Jazz Fest. He said he had never attended and wanted to take his wife. When I saw him again the following week and asked him how he enjoyed the festival, he admitted he hadn’t gone. Instead, he had sold the tickets to a young white visitor.
His wife had declined the invitation to go festing, so Pee Wee headed out alone. He thought he might give the extra ticket away. But a block away from the entrance, he saw people scalping tickets. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to get in on the action. He sold both of the tickets I had given him, pocketed the money and went back home. He only got $40 or $50 from the sale, but it was the return on his investment, $0, that made the deal too good to pass up.
I didn’t chide him about it, but I never gave him tickets again. One week, out of the blue, he brought me two bottles of wine. It was a gift. He wanted me to know that he appreciated a favor, he said. I knew the wine was probably left over from some special reception he worked and hadn’t cost him hard cash. But it was the sentiment that mattered. I accepted the offering and later drank both bottles. Nevertheless, we hit tennis balls less and less frequently after that.
I didn’t miss the tennis but I did miss our conversations. Among other things, Pee Wee was an expert on the history of South Rampart Street, especially the area between Canal Street and Melpomene. Though many of the buildings that used to be there have been demolished, Pee Wee could still remember practically every structure and business by heart. He knew all the owners and, seemingly, some telling bit of gossip about each. In addition to the entrepreneurs, he knew the gamblers, thieves, big shots, pimps, pawn brokers, whores, tailors and working stiffs who made The Mighty Ramp a center of New Orleans street life until the 1960s.
Once or twice I tried to record his recollections and to take notes. Pee Wee clammed up. “I ain’t telling you this so you can write it down in a book and make money off it. I’m just telling you this so you will know. That was a time, boy. That was a time!”
After Hurricane Katrina, I only saw Mr. Pee Wee once. Eighteen months after the storm, he told me of his ordeal and adventures evacuating to his wife’s relatives in Monroe. By then, though, he was back in his Central City home, working to repair damages throughout the neighborhood. I was struck by how vibrant he seemed. He was still wisecracking and strutting around like a little rooster on his rickety bowlegs. The Katrina episode had given him enough material to riff on for decades to come.
Less than a year later, however, Pee Wee’s mouth was shut for good. He was dead, a cancer victim. Only a small paid notice in the daily newspaper marked his passing.
With his dying we lost William Wilson’s unique gifts and contributions – his insider’s view of old South Rampart Street, his uncanny ability to size people up and push their buttons, his appreciation for the fine points of waiting on people and extracting generous tips from them, his mastery of barbershop-style debating. Small gifts, to be sure, but they made a significant contribution to the social fabric of our community and the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.
Pee Wee’s home-going service was held, appropriately enough, at a Central City funeral home. It was eight-rock Christian – strictly old-time religion – with fewer than 75 people in attendance.
The Atkinson/Stern family was well represented at the event. Roughly 15 of Pee Wee’s tennis friends showed up to send him off. He had messed with us all one final time, getting buried on a perfect Saturday morning when he knew we’d rather be on the courts hitting balls and talking trash.
I’m sure he got a nice chuckle out of that. “That was a time, boy. That was a time!”
