An old beached boat, abandoned on its side, lay in the sand above high tide down the beach a little from the hotel, and there my mother sat, day after day, in her light cotton dresses. Her ankles were properly crossed and her arms folded as she watched my two sisters and I play at the water’s edge. Her eyes would be very soft and peaceful as she gazed over the water, and I knew she was thinking of “home.”
Once my daddy picked me up and carried me into the water, as I squealed with delight and fear at being so high up. He dropped me into the ocean, holding onto my arms, and I remember, as he raised me up, screaming in outrage at the burning taste of saltwater in my nostrils that made me want to fight or cry.
The first year there I slept in a cot in my parents’ room, as usual, and I always went to bed before anyone else. Just as at home, the watery colors of twilight came in to terrify me, shining greenly through the buff-colored window-shades which were like closed eyes above my bed. I hated the twilight color and going to bed early, far from the comfortingly familiar voices of my parents, downstairs on the porch of this hotel which belonged to my father’s real-estate buddy who was giving us a good deal for the week.
Those yellow-green window-shade twilights were the color of loneliness for me, and that has never left me. Everything else about that first summer week in Connecticut is lost to me, except the two photographs which show me, as usual, discontent and squinting up against the sun.
The second year we were even poorer, or maybe my father’s real-estate friend had raised his prices. For whatever reason, the five of us shared one bedroom, and there was no space for an extra cot. The room had three windows in it, and two double beds that sagged ever so slightly in the middle of their white chenille-spread-covered expanses. My sisters and I shared one of these beds.
I was still put to bed earlier than my sisters, who were allowed to stay up and listen to “I Love a Mystery” on the old upright cabinet radio that sat in the living room downstairs near the porch window. Its soft tones would drift out across the porch to the cretonne-covered rocking chairs lined up in a row in the soft-salty back-street shore-resort night.
I didn’t mind the twilights so much that year. We had a back room and it got darker earlier, so it was always night by the time I went to bed. Unterrified by the twilight green, I had no trouble at all falling asleep.
My mother supervised the brushing of my teeth, and the saying of my prayers, and then after assuring herself that all was in order, she kissed me goodnight, and turned out the dim, unshaded bulb.
The door closed. I lay awake, rigid with excitement, waiting for “I Love a Mystery” to be over, and for my sisters to come and get into bed beside me. I made bargains with god to keep me awake. I bit my lips and pinched the soft fleshy parts of my palms with my fingernails, all to keep myself from falling asleep.
After an eternity of about thirty minutes, during which I reviewed the entire contents of my day, including what I should and shouldn’t have done that I didn’t or did do, I heard my sisters’ footsteps in the hallway. The door to our room opened and they stepped into the darkness.
“Hey, Audre. You still wake?” That was Helen, four years older than me and the closest to me in age.
I was torn with indecision. What should I do? If I didn’t answer, she might tickle my toes, and if I did answer, what should I say?
“Say, you wake?”
“No,” I whispered in a squeaky little voice I thought consistent with a sleeping state.
“Sure enough, see, she still wake.” I heard Helen’s disgusted whisper to Phyllis, followed by the sharp intake of her breath as she sucked her teeth. “Look, her eyes wide open still.”
The bed creaked on one side of me. “What you still doin’ up, staring like a ninny? On the way in, you know, I told the boogieman come bite your head off, and he comin’ just now to get you good.”
I felt the bed sag under the weight of both of their bodies, one on either side of me. My mother had decreed that I should sleep in the middle, to keep me from falling out of bed, as well as to separate my two sisters. I was so enchanted with the idea of sharing a bed with them that I couldn’t have cared less. Helen reached over and gave me a little preliminary pinch.
“Ouch!” I rubbed my tender upper arm, now sore from her strong little piano-trained fingers. “Oh, I’m goin’ to tell Mommy how you pinching me and you goin’ to get a whipping sure enough.” And then, triumphantly, I played my hole card. “And too besides, I’m goin’ to tell her what among-you doing in bed every night!”
“Go ahead, ninny, run your mouth. You goin’ to run it once too often ’til it drop off your face and then just see how it’s goin’ to gobble up you toes!” Helen sucked her teeth again, but moved her hand away.
“Oh, just go to sleep now, Audre.” That was Phyllis, my eldest sister, who was always the peacemaker, the placid, reasonable, removed one. But I knew perfectly well what I had pinched my palms to stay awake for, and I was waiting, barely able to contain myself.
For that summer, in that hot back room of a resort slum, I had finally found out what my sisters did at home at night in that little room they shared at the end of the hall, that enticing little room which I was never allowed to enter except by an invitation that never came.
They told each other stories. They told each other stories in endless installments, making up the episodes as they went along, from fantasies engendered by the radio adventure shows to which we were all addicted in those days.
There was “Buck Rogers,” and “I Love a Mystery,” “Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy,” “The Green Hornet,” and “Quiet Please.” There was “The FBI in Peace and War,” “Mr. District Attorney,” “The Lone Ranger,” and my all-time favorite, “The Shadow,” whose power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him was something I did not stop lusting for until quite recently.
I thought that the very idea of telling stories and not getting whipped for telling untrue was the most marvelous thing I could think of, and every night that week I begged to be allowed to listen, not realizing that they couldn’t stop me. Phyllis didn’t mind so long as I kept my mouth shut, but by bedtime Helen had had enough of a pesky little sister and my endless stream of questions. And her stories were always far and away the best, filled with tough little girls who masqueraded in boys’ clothing and always foiled the criminals, managing to save the day. Phyllis’s hero was a sweet strong boy of few words named George Vaginius.
“Please, Phyllis?” I wheedled. There was a long moment of quiet, with Helen sucking her teeth ominously, then Phyllis, whispering, “All right. Who’ turn it is tonight?”
“I’m not saying a word ’til she asleep!” That was Helen, determined.
“Please Phyllis, please let me listen?”
“No! No such thing!” Helen was adamant. “I know you too well in the dark to have to shine a light on you!”
“Please, Phyllis, I promise I be quiet.” I could feel Helen swelling up beside me like a bullfrog, but I persisted, not realizing or caring that my appeal to Phyllis’s authority as the elder sister only infuriated Helen even more.
Phyllis was not only softhearted, but very practical, with the pragmatic approach of an eleven-year-old West Indian woman.
“Now you promise you never goin’ to tell?”
I felt like I was being inducted into the most secret of societies.
“Cross my heart.” Catholic girls never hoped to die.
Helen was obviously not convinced. I stifled a squeak as she nipped me again with her fingers, this time on the thigh.
“I’m getting tired of all this, you know. So if you ever so much as breathe a word about my stories, Sandman’s comin’ after you the very same minute to pluck out you eyes like a mackerel for soup.” And Helen smacked her lips suggestively, giving way with a parting shot.
I could just see those little white rubbery eyeballs swimming about in the bottom of the Friday night fish stew, and I shuddered.
“I promise, H
elen, cross my heart. I don’t say a word to nobody, and I’ll be so quiet, you’ll see.” I put both of my hands up across my mouth in the darkness, jittering with anticipation.
It was Helen’s turn to begin.
“Where were we, now? Oh yes, so me and Buck had just fetched back the sky-horse when Doc…”
I could not resist. Down came my hands.
“No, no, Helen, not yet. Don’t you remember? Doc hadn’t gotten there yet, because…” I didn’t want to miss a single thing.
Helen’s little brown fingers shot across the bedclothes and gave me such a nip on the buttocks that I screeched in pain. Her voice was high and indignant and full of helpless fury.
“You see that? You see that? What I tell you, Phyllis?” She was almost wailing in fury. “I knew it! She can’t keep that miserable tongue in she mouth one minute. Sure enough, I told you so, didn’t I? Didn’t I? And now too besides she want to steal me story!”
“Sh-h-h-h! The two-a-you! Mommy’s comin’ back here just now, and among-you two goin’ to make us all catch hell!”
But Helen wasn’t going to play any more. I felt her flop over on her side with her disgruntled back towards me, and then I could feel our bed shaking with her angry sobs of rage, muffled in the sweaty pillow.
I could have kicked myself. “I truly sorry, Helen,” I ventured. And I really was, because I realized that my big mouth had done me out of a night’s installment, and probably of all the installments for the rest of the week. I also knew that Mother would never let me out of her sight the next day long enough for me to catch up to my sisters, as they ran off down the beach to complete their tale in secret.
“Honest, I didn’t mean to, Helen.” I tried one last time, reaching over to touch her. But Helen jerked her body sharply backward and her butt caught me in the stomach. I heard her still outraged warning hissed through clenched teeth.
“And don’t you dare pat me!” I had been on the receiving end of her fingers often enough to know when to leave well enough alone.
So I turned over on my stomach, said goodnight to Phyllis, and finally went to sleep, too.
The next morning, I woke up before either Phyllis or Helen. I lay in the middle of the bed, being careful not to touch either one of them. Staring up at the ceiling, I listened to my father snoring, in the next bed, and to the sound of my mother’s wedding ring hitting the headboard in her sleep, as she flung her arm across her eyes against the morning light. I relished the quiet, the new smells of strange bedclothes and sea-salty air, and the frank beams of yellow sunlight pouring through the high windows like a promise of endless day.
Right then and there, before anybody else woke up, I decided to make up a story of my own.
6
In the Harlem summers of my earliest days, I walked between my two sisters while they plotted the overthrow of universes, in the casual make-believe language of comic books. For those comic books, the other reigning and possessive passion of our summer days besides the library, we walked for miles uphill. With determination and great resolve, we trudged up Sugar Hill, 145th Street from Lenox to Amsterdam, to trade in old comic books at the used comic-book store up on Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights, which was an all-white section of town then, in those days before the war, and which is where my mother now lives.
The store was run by a fat white man with watery eyes and a stomach that hung over his belt like badly made jello. He tore the covers off the leftover comic books and sold the books at half-price, or exchanged them for other old comics in good condition, one for two. There were rows and rows and rows of table bins with garish, frontless comics in them, and as soon as my sisters took off down one of the rows for their favorites, Buck Rogers and Captain Marvel, I started searching for pictures of Bugs Bunny. The old man followed me down the aisle, puffing his evil cigar.
I tried to run back to my sisters, but it was too late. His bulk took up the whole row, and I was painfully aware that I was not supposed to have left their sides, anyway.
“Lemme help you up, sweetheart, you can see better.” And I felt his slabby fingers like sausages grab my ribs and hoist me through a sickening arc of cigar fumes to the edge of the bins full of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig comics. I seized whichever was nearest and squirmed to be put down, frantic for the feeling of the floor under my feet once more, and sickened by the squishy touch of his soft belly against the small of my back.
His nasty fingers moved furtively up and down my body, now trapped between his pressing bulges and the rim of the bin. By the time he loosened his grip and allowed me to slide down to the blessed floor, I felt dirtied and afraid, as if I had just taken part in some filthy rite.
I soon learned I could avoid him by staying close to my sisters. If I ran out the other end of the row he would not follow, but then when my sisters finally tallied up their transactions, there would be no extra one tossed in, “for the little sweetheart.” The slabby fingers and the nauseating hoist were the price I paid for a torn and faceless copy of an old Bugs Bunny comic. For years I had nightmares of being hoisted up to the ceiling and having no way of getting down again.
It was a day’s journey up the hill for us, three little brown girls, one not even yet able to read. But it was a summer outing, and better than sitting at home until our mother came back from the office or from marketing. We were never allowed to go out and simply play in the street. It was a day’s journey there and back again, across the two flat crosstown blocks to Eighth Avenue where the Father Divine shoe repair booth stood, and then up the endless hills, block after crosstown block.
Sometimes, when my mother announced to my father after dinner our planned journey the next day, they would slip into patois for a brief consultation. By searching their faces carefully, I could tell they were discussing whether or not they could afford to spare the few cents necessary to finance the expedition.
At other times, we were commissioned by our father to drop off his shoes at the Father Divine booth to be half-soled. That would also include a shoeshine, an allowable extravagance because it only cost three cents and a Peace, Brother, Peace salutation.
Right after breakfast was cleared away, my mother left to go down to the office and we walked with her as far as the corner. Then the three of us turned left to 145th Street, past the Lido Bowling Palace, a few bars and some indeterminate candy-grocery stores whose largest turnover was in little white slips with numbers scrawled upon them.
Three plump little Black girls, dimpled knees scrubbed and oiled to a shine, hair tightly braided and tied with threads. Our seersucker sunsuits, mother-made, were not yet an embarrassment to my budding older sister.
We trudged up the hill past the Stardust Lounge, Micky’s Hair-Styling—Hot and Cold Press, the Harlem Bop Lounge, the Dream Café, the Freedom Barber Shop, and the Optimo Cigar Store which seemed to decorate every important street corner of those years. There was the Aunt May Eat Shoppe, and Sadie’s Ladies and Children’s Wear. There was Lum’s Chop Suey Bar, and the Shiloh Baptist Mission Church painted white with colored storefront windows, the Record Store with its big radio chained outside setting a beat to the warming morning sidewalk. And on the corner of Seventh Avenue as we waited for the green light arm in arm, the yeasty and suggestively mysterious smell issuing from the cool dark beyond the swinging half-doors of the Noon Saloon.
We started up the hill, which was really six hills. Standing up at the bottom on Eighth Avenue and looking upward in the bright sunlight seemed like forever. Vertical trolley tracks dissected the hills. The sidewalks were ribbons of pavement and people. Halfway up the hill on the right side, between Bradhurst and Edgecombe Avenues, was the broad expanse of tufted green, surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence, that was Colonial Park. It was not a public park, or at least it was not free. Since we never had the ten cents admission price, we had never been inside.
My arm was sore from being pulled along, but that was the price I had to pay if I dared fall behind. Just as taking me along was t
he price my literate, comic-book-reading sisters had to pay if they wanted to go out at all. I was always much too out of breath to complain.
We crossed over the busy thoroughfare of 145th Street, all holding hands. We paused halfway up the hills at Bradhurst, to press our faces against the wrought-iron bars around Colonial Park. I could barely hear the splashing of cool bright water and the liquid laughter rising up from the half-hidden private swimming pool. But even those faint sounds of coolness drifted greenly toward our dry mouths. By that time it seemed as if we had been walking forever. The sun beat down without mercy straight out of the sky over Colonial Park. There was no shade anywhere. But beside the park, the air was somewhat cooler. We hung around for a while even though there were no benches outside. The busy life of the Harlem thoroughfare swept along past us.
Despite Mother’s cautionings not to tarry, we lingered near the green pool’s fresh smell. The bags of comic books were jealously guarded in the hands of each of my sisters, and in my sweaty hands I clutched a bag of saltines and three bananas for a snack. Our lunch was prepared and waiting at home.
We each had a saltine cracker, leaning against the railing of the park. My sister Helen fussed at me because I had mashed up all the crackers by swinging the bag back and forth in time to my trot. We brushed off the crumbs with the napkin in the bag, and then continued our journey up the seemingly endless hills.
Finally we reached the crest of Amsterdam Avenue. On the clearest days, I could stand on tiptoe and look westward, barely sighting along the buildings across Broadway to Riverside Drive. Behind the drive’s sharp dip of trees was the faint, almost imagined, line of water that was the Hudson River. For years, whenever I heard the song “America the Beautiful,” I would think of those moments standing on the crest of Amsterdam Avenue. In my mind, the phrase “from sea to shining sea” was visualized as from the East to the Hudson Rivers.
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