The curtain is drawn on Mr. Yates' window

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By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published December 4, 2001

In those rare moments over the past 10 years when I decided I needed a haircut, I would go to see Joe Yates. Sometimes there would be a "Closed" sign on his door. That was no big deal. Even the owner of a one-man operation has to take time off sometime.

I never learned which day of the week he routinely used as his day off. I just didn't need to know that many times a year.

Anyway, the closed sign was a good excuse for me to put the haircut off until the next time the urge hit me.

The sign was up a couple of months ago when I went there, then again when I went back a couple of weeks later.

Mr. Yates' shop is on 22nd Street S, where it's been for half a century. His home is in the same place.

Mr. Yates came here from Cairo, Ga., a place less than an hour's drive from the area of Brooks County where I grew up. I didn't know that when I walked into his shop the first time.

Mr. Yates was a lot like the men I grew up around, which, I suppose, is why it's hard for me to call him anything but Mr. Yates. He had their same way of answering with common sense questions that politicians and the lettered, people who see simplicity as lack of sophistication, wrap in layers of complications. Mr. Yates knew he was a smart man. You could tell in the way he posed questions, with a glint that said he knew the answer and that he knew you knew the answer, but wanted to see if you'd thought it the step further that he had.

I didn't know that when I walked into his shop the first time.

I didn't know when I walked into his shop that first time that he would find his way into many of my columns over the years.

I just knew that his shop looked a lot like the first one I walked into all those years ago, in Quitman, Ga., trying my best to pretend that the woman walking next to me was not my mama, in case some of my ninth-grade friends saw me, thankful none of them was there when she jumped up as the barber lathered my head to razor the hairline. "Don't shave him," she yelled, shooting down all pretenses her teenaged son had of independence.

Inside smelled the way a fresh haircut used to smell, a combination of the talc the barber dumped into the soft brush he used to whisk away errant clippings that had fallen down the back of your shirt and the blue or green liquid he patted near your hairline when he was finished.

Inside, a couple of old men faced each other and slammed wooden checkers onto a checkerboard with the authority of players who know they're making the right move.

I had slammed more than a few checkers that way myself against some of the best players in Brooks County. I held my own back then. I challenged the winner. I could still hold my own.

I felt at home there. And when you're a country boy stuck in the city, home is a rare feeling.

Outside, through the window Mr. Yates often stared out as if getting his thoughts from a Teleprompter out there somewhere, there wasn't much. The lot across the street was vacant in 1992, when I walked into Mr. Yates' shop that first time. Crack was wreaking its unique brand of havoc, and 22nd Street was one of its main thoroughfares. I watched through that window with Mr. Yates as prostitutes and laborers walked to or from work, mothers walked their children home from the bus stop, boys rode bicycles, carrying guns and drugs or books and dreams.

Mr. Yates remembered when three doctors had offices within a few blocks of him, the Hardin Brothers had a grocery store and there was also a pharmacy. That was in the area's heyday, when marquee performers were the norm for 22nd Street's night life.

Over the years, I came to learn there was more outside that window than I could see.

In 1993, after Mr. Yates and four first-time voters he took to the polls with him put David Fischer in office, effectively running the recalcitrant, fired police Chief Ernest Curtsinger out of town, I needed another haircut. Mr. Yates had no great expectations of Fischer; black voters had elected him in self-defense. Curtsinger had shown disdain for the city's black officeholders and institutions.

Mr. Yates didn't expect his street or his community to get any special treatment from Fischer. Didn't want any. All he wanted was for Fischer to treat all residents and precincts the same. And he wanted Fischer to come look out his shop window to see if that was being done.

To Fischer's credit, he paid Mr. Yates a visit.

I don't know how much credit Mr. Yates deserves -- he would probably refuse any -- but Fischer's administration ushered in a new attitude toward Mr. Yates' part of town.

At haircut time once a few years ago, Mr. Yates told me that everybody is respectful and respectable when they come into his shop. Many of them came in as children their first time. "I always tried to make an impression by talking to them, but more by the way I live," Mr Yates told me. "Adults should make the example."

The greatest ambition is not to be a superstar athlete or a millionaire, Mr. Yates said. "We used to call it "a decent person."'

Mr. Yates got robbed that year, by a young man he had seen from his window before, walking the street. He had not been into his shop.

When I went to get my haircut, Mr. Yates was talking to another young man about a program that would help him get work. Mr. Yates was also getting ready to testify against the man who robbed him, determined to make sure he spent time in jail.

"The boy is a criminal," Mr. Yates said. He needs to be punished before he can be rehabilitated. But when he got out, he would have no bigger advocate than Mr. Yates, who never lost sight that even his robber was "somebody's child."

It has been weeks now since I last saw the closed sign in Mr. Yates' window. I read the reason why in the newspaper -- in the obituaries.

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