Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  That was a lot of money. Even split three ways between the partners, it meant that Daddy’s share would be $1,666. I don’t know where he got the cash. Had he saved that much money? Did he borrow it from someone? If so, how did he ever pay it back?

  Thinking back from where I am now, he should have listened to Mama. It was the wrong time to purchase a house and then to convert it. Well, I guess he thought he could.

  Our apartment was on the main floor. It was nice. Five rooms, a private hall, good closet space, bigger rooms, and Mama could look out windows and see something besides clotheslines and fire escapes. The windows were three sets of bay windows right off the street. Mama made crisscross curtains. The apartment looked good. We were all moving right along.

  Mama had no choice but to let Daddy do what he wanted to do even as the conversion went forward. Besides, she had her hands full cleaning and cooking for all of us. We usually had oatmeal and prunes for breakfast. We came home for lunch, which was leftovers from dinner the night before. Our after-school snack was johnnycake, which was whole-wheat flour and water cooked on top of the stove. Dinner was either lamb stew, beef stew, beans and rice, or chili con carne, but on Sunday there was pot roast. We didn’t have much chicken. My sister Mary calls Mama “the original health nut.” We had lots of fish, fresh fruit, and vegetables. Always more fruit and vegetables than meat or dairy. After all, in Anegada, the fruits and vegetables came from the trees and out of the ground. The fish was caught fresh from the water; there were no snacks, candy, or soda on the island, so my parents did not know any other way to live. These were the habits Mama and Daddy brought with them. I guess that my siblings and I had an Anegadian upbringing on American soil.

  One time, money was so tight for a month that food became scarce in our house because there were so many people to feed. A neighbor gave Mama a piece of fresh pork to roast. Mama didn’t want it because neither she nor my father believed in eating pork, but she was not about to let her family go hungry. She tried to follow the neighbor’s instructions, but I guess she did something wrong because everyone in the house got sick and had to get treated in the emergency room. After that, I never saw pork in our house again, no matter how bad times got.

  The three youngest children (Daisy, Mary, and Tina) were all born in the hospital. Daddy went to get Mama from the hospital one day. When they came back, she had a baby named Daisy. The baby was real pretty with a lot of curly hair. I was not accustomed to Mama going away and coming back with a baby because all the rest of us had been born at home, so I was very confused about the whole thing.

  While my parents wrestled with our economic problems, my siblings and I dealt with our own concerns. By now, all of us older kids were in school and dealing with the problems that all kids have. How to get good school reports, how to make friends, and things like that. Mama and Daddy were always busy so we pretty much figured out those kinds of things by ourselves.

  Later on, I got my first best friend, a Panamanian girl named Estelle. We spent our time jumping double Dutch, skating, racing, and climbing trees. Once, a group of five neighborhood kids chipped in and hired a bike for a quarter. We took turns riding it all day. It was so much fun.

  At one point, my siblings and I all had our own friends. This led to squabbles about who didn’t like who until Daddy got tired of hearing it and said, “Whether you like their friends or not, that’s their friends. I don’t want to hear no argument.”

  With so many kids in the house, there were always two having a disagreement about something. Mama would let the two parties vent for a little while before she stepped in and made a decision about who was right and who was wrong. Her decision was final and we learned very quickly to let the issue slide once she had spoken. If Daddy heard anything else, he would come stomping out of their room and yell, “Listen to your mama. I don’t want to come out here anymore.”

  Tina was born when I was ten and she was like a doll for me to play with; I made sure that Tina was never wet or hungry. Since there was such a huge age difference between us, we didn’t really become friends until adulthood. But before that, she was my baby. I made her first dresses and fussed over her like she was my own child. She was fun, unlike Mary who was a sickly child.

  Mary had sprue which is a chronic digestive disorder. It seemed like whatever Mama gave her to eat came right back up or made her stomach cramp. She lost weight at the drop of a hat and was extremely skinny because there was so little food that she could eat and hold onto. She was also a nervous wreck. A sudden loud noise would upset her. A prolonged argument would upset her. You certainly couldn’t tease her or get into any kind of argument with her. I felt sorry for Mary. Her life seemed exhausting. For some reason, sprue usually affects people of Caribbean descent. Later on, Mary was sent to Catholic school because public school was too rough for her constitution.

  A year after buying the second Harlem building, Daddy got further into debt when he bought a grocery store at 2187 Seventh Avenue between 129th and 130th Street. So now he was a landlord and a business owner. He was one hardworking man.

  My brother Oswald and I worked in the store. Everything came in a croker sack, like the grits and the sugar and the rice. A croker sack looks like a burlap bag, but it’s coarser and stronger. There was a scale to weigh one pound, three pounds, and five pounds because that’s what people would ask for. People mostly bought three pounds of everything. We also had milk. The milk came in two big chrome galvanized containers. There was the pint and the quart. Everybody bought their milk pail and it cost two dollars a quart. The bread man came twice a day. Fresh bread came in the morning and sold for eight cents. By noon it wasn’t considered fresh bread anymore. The bread man would come back and take it out and give you another tray. He took the old tray to a bakery and they would sell it for a penny a loaf.

  Daddy had realized his dreams of home ownership and was extremely proud that he was now a self-employed man, but he had moved a little too fast and was in way over his head. Things started going bad after a while, so he started taking money from the store to keep the apartment building going, but it didn’t work. When this second partnership was dissolved, he couldn’t keep up the apartment building payments. As a result, we lost our home. We had to live in the back of the store. There were three big rooms back there. A partition divided the only bedroom so that it made two small bedrooms. There was only one closet. The whole apartment looked like a dormitory housing six children and two adults, with another baby on the way. The apartment was designed to accommodate someone while they worked in the store, not for heavy family living. The only room that did not have a bed in it was the kitchen. Before we left that place for a new apartment, there were two more babies, bringing the grand total to eight children. In just about three years, I had lived in three different places and attended three different schools. I did not understand or care about broken business deals, disgruntled partners, or people whose ambition exceeded their means. I just wanted to stay in one place.

  Nevertheless, I loved living in back of the store. We had access to the back yard and used to play a game there with a tire which was tied around a tree. We also had a fire escape to play on.

  My new classroom was crowded, just like the house. In those days, there were no laws about how many kids could be stuffed into one classroom. Overcrowding was real, but no one talked about it, and the teachers must have felt overwhelmed at times. Most of the children in my class came from families that did not have any more money than mine had. This was a blessing because I was a sensitive child who would have noticed the difference and felt badly even though I never would have said a word about it.

  I started playing hooky, although I didn’t know then what it was that was driving me. I only remember feeling squeezed. It seemed like there wasn’t enough space nowhere. At home, we were shoulder to shoulder even at night, because there were too many of us for everyone to have his own bed. During the day, the classroom was often overcrowded and I eventually found myself
wishing for a space to just be. I would walk past the school and go down by the East River, sit on my books, and watch the river move ever so calm. Sometimes a log would go by, never no garbage.

  We were still living on Seventh Avenue, which was considered the black folks’ Broadway. Blacks owned most of the small businesses and a few of the buildings. I remember three little gray shops that were restaurants. Blue/White Diamond Jewelers on 125th Street was also black owned, but the owner had to put white management in to draw the black customers. No one knew that the owner was black until after he died.

  It was a vibrant scene. Apex hair dressing/training school was on 135th Street, and above that was the space which Percy Sutton would someday claim for his law office before going on to become one of the most famous and respected men in the history of Harlem.

  Most of the black doctors owned their buildings, especially on Strivers Row which was right off Seventh Avenue. Closer to home, there was the famous Lafayette Theater, the chicken & waffle house, and Count Basie and his band also had space nearby.

  I remember 1927 when the street lights were put in. The school teachers took the students out and warned them to cross only on the green light, never on the red or anything in between. I also remember when they started building the Independent Subway line back in 1932 and the Eighth Avenue El train being taken down around 1936.

  Someone started a wet wash service. They would pick up your clothes and return them a day later in a big canvas bag. That was a big help to Mama who had another baby on the way. Sleeping arrangements were as follows: In one of the bedrooms was Mama, Daisy, and Mary, who was the youngest. In the other small bedroom was Omena, myself, and Oscar. In the living room we had a divan. Daddy and others slept there.

  The store continued to do well, but the way things were sold started to change.

  Fresh bread and milk were still delivered to the store every day, and the day-old bread and cake were still taken away. But the milk now came in larger metal containers. The small one held about four gallons. The large one held about ten gallons. There was a pint-size dipper in the small one and a quart-size dipper in the large one. People brought in their milk pail every morning. The cheese came wrapped in cheesecloth in a big round container about thirty-eight inches in circumference and six inches tall and then it was cut to order. Rice, sugar, flour, cornmeal, and grits came in fifty-pound burlap bags and had to be weighed in one and two-pound paper bags and stored under the counter, ready for sale as customers came into the store. No more croker sacks.

  Daddy was having asthma attacks more frequently. Oswald had to keep the store clean and weigh up the bags of sugar, rice, and flour. I folded them and stored them under the counter. On Saturdays, Oswald and I took grocery orders over the phone and delivered them. We traveled from the store to as far as ten blocks away carrying groceries in corrugated boxes on our shoulders. We held onto the boxes with one hand on our hip, and walked down from 129th Street to 118th Street. Or we went uptown into the 130s. This was continuous for three hours on Saturdays, rain or shine. People gave us two or three-cent tips, but Daddy took our tip money. He’d say, “How much you got?”

  “Well, Daddy, I got three cents and Oswald got three cents.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, “put it on the counter.”

  So we put it on the counter and he took it.

  I said, “Daddy, that’s our money.”

  He said, “That’s my groceries.”

  We felt bad about that. Oswald would go next door to the shoemaker and shine shoes for nickels and dimes. I would clean up for one of our favorite customers or mind her little girl, Gloria. This drive to work continued throughout our teens and beyond.

  I took my new baby sister, Tina, as my own personal doll. Now there were ten of us in these rooms. The grocery store continued to do well. I think business was booming everywhere. People were always dressed up and looking happy. Things were going good for the Potter clan. Then one day there were a lot of confused looks on people’s faces. There was a lot of talk about Wall Street and the stock market. People were jumping out of office windows. The paper boys were yelling, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” People stopped in the street to listen because a man was yelling like it was very important that some big stock market had crashed. In the coming days, people jumped off the Empire State Building so often that for a while it was called Suicide Point.

  The stock market crash happened on October 29, 1929, which was Mama’s forty-first birthday. The Great Depression had begun. Things started going downhill and bad times lasted for many, many years.

  Like the rest of the United States, the 1929 stock market crash jolted Harlem. The economic devastation that swept the nation gripped black folk mightily because we also had racism to deal with. Grown men fought over scraps. Sixty-three percent of the children in Harlem struggled with malnutrition. With the onset of the Great Depression, the desperation of millions compounded blacks’ usual difficulties in securing and maintaining employment and providing for their families.

  When the Great Depression came, our customers didn’t have any more money to buy stuff. People were without their basic needs. Daddy had to pull money from the store to pay for the house at 287 West 142nd Street. Then we moved to a railroad flat that had heat and hot water, and what did Daddy do? He took out the gas stove and put in a coal stove and bought one bag of coal. After the coal was gone, we had to get warm the best way we could. Daddy had no extra money in the store because he had spent it all trying to keep that last apartment building afloat.

  Daddy lost the store and our family hit rock bottom. He rented a wooden pushcart and rolled it through the streets, selling fruits and vegetables. We moved again to another cold-water flat, only this time there was no money for coal or wood to keep us warm.

  Daddy lost everything but never gave up. He took the push cart and went up to the Bronx wholesale market and filled his cart with onions, potatoes, cabbage, spinach, string beans, and lemons. After he got the pushcart, we ate most of what he couldn’t sell, like cabbage and white potatoes, which Mama made with boiled spareribs. He and Oswald pushed up and down streets selling wherever they could. Daddy finally found a spot on Lenox Avenue and 139th Street. By the time Daddy found it, Oswald was no longer with him. They had a disagreement because Oswald rented a cart too and bought supplies from the wholesale market. Daddy was furious and told Oswald, “Whatever money you make on this cart, you give it to me.” Oswald said no. He had gotten the cart and supplies with his own money. Daddy said, “There is only one man here and that is me.” Oswald still refused to give him the money, so Daddy said Oswald could no longer stay at the house.

  Oswald went to Mr. Rose’s house. He was the shoemaker and our neighbor when we had the store. He told Mr. Rose what happened. Mr. Rose told Oswald he could stay in his basement. Mr. Rose owned the six-story building on the corner of 129th Street, so that’s where Oswald stayed and continued to rent his cart and go the other way. One day, while pushing around, he met Aunt Tantee and explained what happened. She invited him to stay with her. She had three bedrooms and was alone since her daughter had passed away. So Oswald stayed with her until he got called for the merchant marine in July of 1934.

  The weather was getting bad, but we could not find any wood to burn in the stove since most of the buildings on the block were using coal. My brother, Oscar, pulled a door off one of the rooms and busted it up for fire. He did this more than once. When he ran out of room doors, he used cabinet doors and drawers. Years later, when we prepared to move yet again, the landlord was furious.

  In 1935, we moved to a six-room apartment. Daddy’s pushcart was doing pretty good. Daisy and I helped him most weekends and during summer vacations. She would be with Daddy most of the time.

  Estelle was still my closest girlfriend. She lived with her father and grandmother who worked all kinds of hours. I’m not sure what had happened to her mother, but her father was overly strict and kind of mean. They lived in the building next to m
ine. One day, Estelle and I had come home from school. I started into my house, and I saw her start into her place and then stop.

  I called out, “What happened?”

  She said, “I can’t find my key.”

  I went to her and said, “Don’t worry.”

  She said, “I’m so afraid. I’m going to get a whipping.”

  Now, Estelle lived on the fourth floor of her building. I had an idea. What if I somehow got onto her fire escape, went into her apartment through the window, and got the keys for her? It seemed like a sound plan to me. So I went up to the fourth floor of my building and asked the woman who lived there if I could go out on her fire escape.

  The woman said, “You could get hurt.”

  I replied, “Just pray for me,” and went out her window.

  By this time, Estelle was standing in the hallway.

  I knew that if I misstepped, I would end up crumpled on the concrete ground between our two buildings, but I had no fear. I just kept my mind on Estelle’s need for somebody to help her. I climbed over and onto her fire escape. Those windows were always kept open. I had to take my foot and push up the window. Then I went through feet first and fell onto Estelle’s floor.

  I quickly made my way through the apartment. I went through a living room and then toward the front of the place. Right next to the front door there was a table with a lamp on it. Estelle’s keys were right there. I grabbed them and went back to the window, onto the fire escape, and into the neighbor woman’s house. I didn’t go out through the door because I was afraid I’d be seen and my parents would find out. I don’t know if the neighbor woman had been praying like I had asked her to or not, but she sure looked relieved to see me.

  “You didn’t cut yourself and leave any blood over there, did you?”