The Boogie-Down Bronx and Clive’s Kool New Accent
Although the number of West Indian residents grew steadily in New York during the late 60s and throughout the 70s, due in part to British anti-immigration acts passed in the 1960s and the U.S. 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origins as the basis for immigration legislation, Clive Campbell’s experience shows that a critical mass had not yet crystallized so that borough culture could reflect such “foreign” infusions as Jamaicanness or so that notions of blackness could include Anglo-Caribbean or Latin-Caribbean versions. Far from the aura of quasi-exotic cool that it carries today, being Jamaican in the Bronx during the 1970s carried such a stigma that some young immigrants found it better to conceal their backgrounds. Not only would Clive have to lose his accent to fit in among his new peers, he would have to lose his “hick” clothing as well, including the boots, or “roach killers,” for which he was ridiculed at school. Although Clive denies that he ever hid his Jamaicanness, he puts the situation in perspective by recalling a particularly telling example of how this harassment would play out in his new neighborhood: “At that time [the early 1970s], being Jamaican wasn’t fashionable. Bob Marley didn’t come through yet to make it more fashionable, to even give a chance for people to listen to our music. . . . I remember one time a guy said, ‘Clive, man, don’t walk down that way cause they throwing Jamaicans in garbage cans’ ” (Chang 72). Of course, for a young man in a working-class family, adopting a new accent was, in a certain sense, a lot easier than finding a new wardrobe.
Having honed something of an American accent by singing along to his parents’ records, Clive continued to mold his voice upon moving to the Bronx, tuning to the distinctively American enunciations of Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack as well as their African-American contemporaries, including Chuck Leonard and Frankie Crocker, on such stations as WWRL, New York’s most popular “black music” station at that time. Adjusting his accent so as to be intelligible to classmates, by the time he began attending classes and playing sports at Alfred E. Smith High School, few of his peers would have identified Clive as a Jamaican — or even thought about throwing him in a garbage can. Indeed, a prodigious weight-lifter, a track medalist, and a fierce basketball player who could dunk the ball with ease, Clive Campbell, standing over six feet tall at this point, would soon be crowned with the first part of his new name: “Herc,” short for Hercules.
