Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  When I heard her voice, I opened my door and asked him to please stop calling me because I was afraid. He got real nasty, called me a liar, and told me to get out.

  Mrs. Mendleshon said, “She can’t leave now. It’s dark outside. We’ll get in trouble.”

  I guess since it was the middle of the night, she thought that I could get badly hurt and they would get the blame for it.

  So the next day she paid me $13.50 and gave me five cents carfare to get home. I was nervous and shaking inside. Once again, God had stepped in and saved me. The woman could just have easily gone back up those stairs and pretended not to hear the sexual assault that was surely coming.

  In those days, the body of a black woman was fair game. If that man had even gone so far as to rape me, there wouldn’t have been anything done about it. That was always the problem working in folks’ houses whether you were a sleep-in maid or just came in to clean every day. Some women had to submit to the urges of the husband. In other places, it was an uncle, an adult son, or even a guest of the family. Black women for the most part didn’t even bother to report unlawful touching, sexual assault, or rape. What would have been the point? The court system was set up to protect the men and make the woman look like a tramp. Plus, there was nowhere a black woman could go where it was different. From what I heard, the homes of the wealthy in New York City were a treat compared to what was happening to the maids in states below Washington, DC. Down there in the Deep South, if a black woman refused, she could find herself accused of stealing from the family, which meant automatic jail time. It was terrible!

  I always thank God that Daddy and Mama settled in the North. God knows what me and my sisters would have gone through in one of those Southern states.

  Traumatized and with nowhere else to go, I showed up at Daddy’s door. He didn’t mention the twelve dollars that he owed me. He didn’t ask where I’d been for two weeks. He didn’t welcome me home. Nothing. He simply let me in and walked away. I felt so unwanted. I can’t describe the hurt to this day.

  I went back to the factory.

  There were plenty of factories. You could always get a job in the factory. If you were at one place and couldn’t get along, you’d just go back outside and try another company. Every time I got a garment, I would look at it and think, Let me see, what would Mama do? and then I did the same thing. I was very well liked because my work was fast and it was good. I made all kinds of clothing. Plus, I knew how to work as an operator, a finisher (the person who sews on all of the collars, buttons, and does the hem after a garment is finished), and a trimmer, who takes the garment from the presser and cuts all of the loose strings away. Pressers did not do anything else except iron the garments. Once the trimmer was through, then someone came in and swept up the area. The boss came in after that and all of the garments were put in plastic bags and hung in specific places according to which store they were going to. Back in those days, everyone had one specific job and stuck to it. One person was not expected to do every step that it takes to make a garment.

  I had a problem with one boss. Every time this manager started talking, he would spit. My father advised me to hold a handkerchief up to my face when it happened. That handkerchief got me fired. I know that the boss felt insulted, but I couldn’t have him spitting on me. How did I know what kind of disease he had?

  When the manager told me I was fired, I said, “I don’t care. I been in better places than this.”

  I went just a couple of doors away and there was another operating job. Factories are also seasonal places. Sometimes you get to stay, but most of the time you go from one place to another. The only way you could run out of work to do was if you only knew how to do one thing. Like if you only knew how to make dresses, for instance. There was no guarantee that you could work steady. I didn’t do just one thing. I could make any garment, including children’s coats. When, for some reason, most of the factories were closed for sewing work, I did crocheting. Once, I worked in a place that was preparing for the Christmas rush and all I did was decorate crocheted skirts for the dolls. I had liked crocheting since I was a child and decorated some of our clothing even way back then. After the doll rush was over, I got a chance to work in another factory that focused on hats. The hats were already made, but I had to add designs to the brims or fine stitching around the edges. I got most of the skills, such as sewing dresses, from my mother’s teaching. The rest I learned on the jobs. Most of the factories would show you exactly what they wanted. I learned fast and did exactly as they asked.

  Socially, I was still going out with groups of friends and did not take any guy seriously until I went out with Darryl Richardson. Everybody called him Rip. He was a Jamaican man, born November 11, 1911, which made him four years older than I was.

  I met Rip through my brothers. He was a driver for a Pepsi truck and younger boys hung out at stores where he did a lot of business. My teenage brothers hung out at a stationery store where he delivered soda. They became good friends and he started hanging around my house. He was always coming over to see my brothers. After a while, we started going out.

  Then one day, he said to me, “Gee, you so nice. I’d like to marry you. You want to get married?

  “What? I’m not so interested in marriage cuz nothing out here for nobody. Times are hard and nobody got no money.”

  “Well, looka here, Miss Ida. I’m going to give you my ring and this will be our engagement ring.”

  He took a ring off his finger and put it on mine and I started wearing it.

  Right around this time, all hell broke loose in Harlem and it caused me to worry a lot anytime I didn’t know where Rip or my brothers were. I feared that they had been beaten or arrested. What happened was that tensions caused by employment and police brutality boiled over on March 19, 1935 when police arrested a young Puerto Rican boy who’d been caught stealing a pocketknife from a store. In an attempt to avoid crowds that had gathered, the police whisked the boy out a rear entrance and rumors spread that police were going to beat him. More rumors asserted that the boy had been killed, although police had circulated pictures of the lad, showing him very much alive.

  Mayor Fiorello La Guardia pleaded for calm and patience, but his words fell on deaf ears. Rioting started, and by the end of the next day, March 20, 1935, three African Americans had been killed, sixty were injured, and seventy-five people, mostly black, had been arrested.

  It was a terrible time, and I was nervous anytime Rip or one of my brothers could not be found.

  Our engagement went on for about a year before I took the ring off, saying I wasn’t into it. Then I thought about it some more. I loved him. He seemed nice, he was always working, he was very well mannered. I decided to take a chance on love and told him that I changed my mind. So Rip gave me back the so-called engagement ring. It was September 1936 when we got “engaged.”

  “Why can’t we get together for real?” he asked me one night as he kissed my cheeks.

  I said okay.

  Yes, I knew that sex before marriage was wrong. That had been drilled into my head. But this was not head. I was thinking with my heart. We got together for real and then one more time after that. Soon I started feeling strange, like I wanted to throw up. I went to a doctor and he said, “You’re three months pregnant.”

  What? Oh no!

  For the next few hours, I wondered what day we would get married, what on earth Rip and I were going to do with a baby, where we would find a place to live, and how we were going to get it all done before my father found out what I had done. Those questions were at the forefront of my mind.

  When I told Rip, he said, “I don’t have any money right now.”

  “Well, we don’t have to have some big fancy wedding. Let’s just go on down to city hall and get married, then have a little gathering back at my house.”

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “I don’t want to do it like that.”

  “What is wrong, Rip?”

  “Let me th
ink about it all, Ida. Can I do that?”

  “Okay, Rip, but we don’t have a lot of time.”

  I thought that something was wrong but I couldn’t figure out what it was. It occurred to me that he might just be nervous about the whole thing. One day he is a free delivery truck driver. The next he is a married man with a child on the way? I figured that maybe he just needed a few weeks to get used to the huge change that was coming in his life.

  Weeks went by and I was becoming both suspicious and impatient. I had heard about girls getting left with nothing but a big stomach to show for their foolishness, but Rip couldn’t be trying to do that to me, could he? After all, he was a good friend of my brothers’. He knew my father. He was always around our house. I wasn’t some chippy that he had just rolled around with for giggles.

  Another month went by. Rip and I were not on good terms. I was nervous and suspicious. His cheer seemed forced.

  Round about November I got a letter. It had probably come for me the day before because I had seen a white envelope in the foyer. Now, I had taken a closer look and seen my name. Since it was Thanksgiving Day, I continued on helping out my family with the cooking and all. Dinner was festive. Everybody was in a decent mood and the room smelled good because we had been cooking all day.

  After dinner was over, we all sat down and had some lemonade. Then I went and read my letter. It was like somebody poured a ton of ice on me. The person who sent me the letter had been one of my classmates in seventh grade. Her name was Ina May Swain, and her letter said, “You are having a baby from my husband.”

  What? It can’t be!

  I was so shocked that my throat closed up. I couldn’t even swallow. My Thanksgiving holiday was ruined.

  When Rip came by the next day, I flung the letter at him. “You are married?”

  “No. I’m not married. This is a lie. This lady just wants to hurt your feelings.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Yes. I used to be her boyfriend. We talked about getting married. Then she didn’t want to. Then she did again. I got tired and stopped asking her. I don’t know when was the last time I saw her. I don’t know why she would do this unless it is because she is still angry with me.”

  Satisfied, I stayed in the relationship. Time was running out. I would soon start to show. One evening, I cornered him.

  “Rip. My house is too crowded. You need to find another place to stay.”

  I expected him to bring up marriage right then. What on earth was he waiting for?

  All of a sudden, I was afraid to bring up the word marriage again. I guess deep down inside, I was scared that he would walk away and leave me.

  Daddy figured everything out. I was sick a lot, and since I’m so thin, he would have noticed the tiniest bump that appeared around my waist.

  If he was disappointed in me, he didn’t say so. Daddy didn’t make me feel bad in any way about my predicament. He wasn’t the type of man to waste time or energy on a situation that he could not fix. As far as he was concerned, I had made a very hard bed for myself to lie in and nothing he said or did would make a bit of difference, but I was still grateful to him for not shaming me. He turned out to be right on all counts. There was no need for him to punish me. I was about to be punished severely enough for what I had done.

  Like many people who were trying to make ends meet, Rip’s mother was renting rooms to lodgers, so we moved into one of them. She worked as a charwoman for Western Union, cleaning up the doors and outside. African Americans were given the worst jobs available, especially if they were from another country.

  After a while, Rip’s mother started complaining that we wasn’t paying no rent, so I thought, Oh Lawd, I gone from the frying pan to the fire. The bickering continued. By May I had no choice but to go back to my father’s house again. It was time for me to have my baby.

  His mother had always said that Rip lived with her and slept on the sofa. I later found out that Rip was so sneaky, it was ridiculous. He actually didn’t live at his mother’s house at all; he had a place of his own uptown. She had to know that I was not aware of whatever bachelor place he had. Did she tell him that he was doing me wrong and needed to come clean? Or, did she dislike me so much that no matter what he did to me, it was alright with her? I never approached her with those questions because I had too much pride. I didn’t want her to think I was begging for something. Or worse, give her a chance to really insult me.

  My house was just plain overcrowded. Mommy Dell and Daddy now had a nine-month-old boy. After the situation with Rip’s mother didn’t work out, I realized that he wasn’t going to marry me and probably never had planned to go through with our engagement. If he really wanted to marry me, he would have. Why let me go back home to have the baby?

  After the baby was born, I decided to just go out on my own and continue working. Daisy (who didn’t get married until much later when Daddy had passed away) was still at home. I could bring the baby to her every morning and pick it up at night.

  Anyway, I did the best that I could. At first, I shared an apartment with one of my friends. Actually, it was my stepmother’s friend and it didn’t work out.

  Under the best of circumstances, roommate situations do not work out. At first, I was relieved to get the place. It seemed like just what I needed. The woman wasn’t a stranger and I was tired of trying to figure out my life on my own. A friend seemed like just the ticket. It would have helped if we had known each for a while and already decided that we liked each other. Instead, I had a fretting child, worries that kept me awake staring at the ceiling, and although I tried to be cheerful, it was probably crystal clear that I was always worried about something. Maybe she wanted someone to share the place who would be fun, gossipy, and a confidante. Since I was none of those things, she complained to Mommy Dell that she had changed her mind. I needed to leave her place, and sooner rather than later.

  I didn’t know what to do when the roommate situation fell apart. I said well, I’ll have to make it on my own. I got myself in this stupid mess, I’m gonna have to get myself out. But Rip’s mother said, “Well you can leave the baby here because Danny (her husband) is here all day.”

  If I had had the time to be sad because Rip was not acting loving at all or being protective of me or his child, I probably would have been tearing my hair out. As it was, keeping a roof over my head and food in my mouth took over just about everything else in my mind.

  I still loved Rip but I wasn’t stupid enough not to realize what had happened. All I could do was take care of myself and hope that he changed his mind and married me down the road. I really couldn’t handle any other kind of thoughts. It was just too scary.

  When I got pregnant, I decided I might as well have a healthy baby, so I started with the orange juice and a whole lot of stuff Mama used to give us for breakfast, like oatmeal and prunes.

  Donald was born in 1937, and he moved around so fast, he fell off the bed at three months while trying to crawl.

  My second child, Charles, was born in 1939, and at that point, I still had hope that Rip would get himself together and make us a real family. I had been with Rip for two years and some small part of me wanted to get back together for the sake of our boys.

  By the time Charles was six months old, he was even more active than Donald had been. I had some strong babies. One day, Charles was on the bed sleeping near the window because it was warm. The rooming houses didn’t have things like window screens. I stepped out of the room and accidentally closed the door behind me. Since I had a slam lock on it, there was no way for me to get back in. I left the building screaming and ran down to Lenox Avenue. God was good to me. Right on the corner was a locksmith. I was so upset, I couldn’t even talk straight. I ran in there just babbling my baby is gonna fall out the window, my baby is gonna fall out the window over and over again. The locksmith came back to the building with me. When he got to my room and saw it was a slam lock, he picked out a special key and turned it in the lock. The door op
ened and we went in. Charles was still asleep. He had slept through the entire drama. Thank God!

  If there were any tiny parts of me that still subconsciously wanted Rip, they were about to be smashed to bits.

  It turned out that Rip really did have a wife. In fact, their first child was born the same time as my Donald. I thought of all those lies he had told so smoothly and so clearly. Years later, he and his wife ended up having seven or eight children together after we broke up. If there was one thing in my life that I’ve always regretted, it is believing Rip when he told me that the woman’s letter was full of lies.

  The thing about Rip that just made me confused was that I didn’t just run into his arms the very first time he showed interest in me. I had known him for a long time just as a friend of the family who was often in my home. We took it slow, or I took it slow. I didn’t chase him or try to rush him to get married when he gave me the engagement ring. He was always nice, polite, and respectful before I got pregnant. How could he treat me this way? I guess it doesn’t matter how long you wait and try to get to know a person. There was just nothing I could think of that would explain how he was ignoring me and my problems most of the time. When I found out that he was indeed married, I was just sick to my stomach. There is no other way to put it. Just sick.

  Playing his wife dirty was bad enough, but how could he give me an engagement ring when he knew that he wasn’t free to marry me?

  I had to go through chronic homelessness and fear without being able to take the time to grieve the loss (because this new Rip was someone I neither knew nor understood) of the man I loved. I was sad about the pain and embarrassment that he had caused me. I was sad for his wife and knew that she would never ever believe that I had not known Rip was married when I first agreed to go out with him. To add to the sadness, I felt like a very foolish young woman. I remembered telling him when I first found out that I was pregnant with Donald that we could go to city hall and have a get-together at my house afterward. Worse, I now realized that I should have hardened my heart as soon as he started running away from the suggestion.