by Bil Wright
One night, after I’d jumped in the back, Mom slammed herself in and exploded. “Any other man with a pregnant wife would get off his behind and help me with those heavy bags. But you, you’re in here whistling and waiting, ready to chew me out about paying too damn much for butter and milk.”
I was stunned. Mom hadn’t told me she was pregnant. She didn’t look any different to me. I waited until our Saturday morning together to ask her about it.
“Yep,” she said casually, apparently not hearing the frustration in my voice at being left out of a development that would surely change everything. “What do you want, sister or brother? Ben doesn’t seem to care one way or the other and I’ll be happy as long as the baby’s healthy—fingers, toes, and everything else where it’s supposed to be. So it’s up to you. What’ll it be?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I never thought about it.” At that moment, I was more concerned about where we’d all live. For the past year, the three of us had shared Mom’s one bedroom apartment. I was beginning to think it would always be like that. Or at least, until I was old enough to move out.
Mom said the new baby was the reason we’d be able to move to some place with more room. I thought she was talking about a house like the ones across the street from the projects, but we weren’t leaving the projects. We were moving to what the projects management called a bungalow. It had two floors so it seemed like a house, but all the bungalows were attached, which meant you could still hear the people next door pee and flush the toilet. The good part was that I’d finally have my own room, which to me sounded like being able to escape to another country. There’d be a separate room for the baby, too. With three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and the kitchen and the living room downstairs, there’d be a lot more to clean than before.
Mom hired two men she knew from Saks to help us move, without telling Ben, which made him furious. She said she had no choice since no one in the projects would lift a finger to help us. She was right. People came out onto their stoops to watch us carry boxes across the courtyard, but no one offered to take one. Mom said to me, “You see how jealous they are. That’s because they know our next move will be out of this damn jungle and they’ll be here for the rest of their lives.”
She was still working at Saks, but she also found another job cleaning offices at night. “We need more money now that the baby is coming,” she told me. “Ben’s already upset at how much more rent we’ll have to pay now. I’m trying to meet him halfway with it. At least, while I still can.” When I asked her about looking more tired than I’d ever seen her, she said, “It’s only a little longer. Babies cost money. And I’m not scrimping on anything, no matter what Ben says.”
In order to save, she stopped making appointments to have her hair done. Instead, she sat in front of the stove and pulled the smoking hot comb through her tight, wooly cap of hair until it was all standing away from her face like an Indian headdress. Before, when she’d come back from Miss Helen’s Beauty Box, she had a garden of perfect, black shiny curls in even rows all around her head. Now, she curled only the front herself. She said as she got bigger that it was too hard to reach the back. “Besides,” she said, “I’m doing a good enough job burning up the front.”
She made maternity clothes on the sewing machine she’d brought from New York. Big dresses, big blouses, big skirts. All in solid colors. Lots of different blues or greens, but no polka dots like the white women on the pattern covers.
“Pregnant or no pregnant, I’m not interested in looking like Lucy Ricardo,” Mom said. “No polka dots for me, thank you.”
Ben came home from work one night and handed Mom a soiled brown grocery bag. He told her Shirley Green, a woman with seven kids who lived in the 4C building, had called to him on his way in from the parking lot. She’d dropped the bag from her upstairs window and yelled down for him to deliver it to Mom. Mom told Ben to go ahead and sit down to the table to eat. She stood by the stove holding the bag away from her as if she suspected there was something crawling around inside it, waiting for a chance to escape. After Ben and I began to eat, Mom slowly opened the bag and pulled out two wrinkled, dingy maternity blouses. She unfolded them, held each of them up to the light, examining the collars and the underarms. Refolding them, she put them back into the bag. Then, she went to the sink and washed her hands, splattering water everywhere.
Ben spoke without looking up from his plate. “Of course, it makes more sense to you to spend money buying fancy material to make clothes than to stoop so low as to wear something that somebody gives you. Somebody who used to know you from New York might pass through the projects and recognize you in a dress that wasn’t from Saks.”
Mom reached down and raised the bag up again under the bare lightbulb in our yellow kitchen. “Somebody pass a law saying I have to wear somebody’s stinking handme-down clothes just cause I’m living in the city’s stinking handmedown apartment? Tell Shirley Green I said, ‘No, thank you. I’ll do fine with what I have.’ ”
Ben kept eating like he hadn’t heard her. Mom never sat down at all. She cleaned around and around the pots on the top of the stove, down its front and sides. Then she started on the top again. When Ben’s plate was empty, he got up, placed it in the sink with barely a sound and went into the living room. Ben hardly made any noise ever, doing anything. Even when he spoke, his voice was lower and softer than either Mom’s or mine. When they argued, the louder Mom’s voice got, the quieter his was, which seemed to make her even angrier. Unless you listened well, all you could hear was her, which made her sound like she was crazy, screaming for no reason at all. Ben never sounded like he was arguing. He sounded like he was explaining the truth to someone who didn’t understand it. But his voice was his weapon and when he used it on her, she shouted as though he’d hit her.
Late that night when they started, I got up and went to my door. Ben asked her like it was a word problem in math he wanted her to solve. If she was so much better than everybody in the projects, what was she doing living there when he met her?
“Doing a whole lot better than I’m doing now.” She repeated it over and over again, pacing back and forth across the floor of their bedroom. I got back in bed and put my pillow over my head, but I could still hear her. “A whole lot better than I’m doing now.” I fell asleep trying to remember what she’d looked like then, when she was doing a whole lot better.
• • •
When my sister Lorelle was born, I can’t say Mom looked like she had before she met Ben, but it was definitely an improvement. She would stay home now, she said, at least until Lorelle went to school. “God, do I miss the store, Louis,” she’d confide to me about Saks. “I’ll probably go back part-time when the baby’s a little older.” But about the night job she said, “I sure as hell don’t miss scrubbing down a hundred desk chairs.” She looked like she was pleased with herself and the baby, as if she’d set out to prove something and won. We still had our Saturdays together. She never stopped telling me stories about Bird-land, Sugar Hill, the old Apollo. If she’d had more than two scotches, she’d start to talk about her old boyfriends and by late afternoon, she began to talk about Louis, her first Louis. She never called him my father. That wasn’t the important part. The important part was that Louis was part of her good times, the times before now. What she wouldn’t say, no matter how many scotches she’d had, was what what I wanted to know most. Why wasn’t the Louis she’d wanted to remember so badly she’d given me his name, why wasn’t this Louis ever coming home? Where had he disappeared to?
• • •
It was her first Louis, she said, who’d made sure she got to meet Billie Holiday. “He knew Billie would want one of my dresses, one of Jeanette’s Originals. I wasn’t working from any store-bought patterns then. I had my own designs. A lot of people sewed, but there were only three black women in Harlem who’d made the kind of name for themselves I had. I had the clients the other two couldn’t get, from doctors’ wives to Cotton
Club showgirls.” She lit another cigarette and poured more scotch into her glass. “You want a little soda?”
“Yes,” I mumbled. But I wanted scotch. I wanted to feel the same things she was feeling, in the same way she felt them. Through old records and cigarette smoke.
“From the time I met Louis, he said that’s all I ever talked about. Seeing Billie onstage singing in a Jeanette Original. So he said he figured he didn’t have any choice but to make sure it happened. That’s the way he talked.”
“And he did make sure it happened, right?”
“Yeah. Cause that’s what he was. Half con man, half magician. One minute he’d make a dream come true, next minute he’d open his hands and it would all be gone.”
“But what about Billie?” I wanted to know. Had he made good on his promise to her about Billie?
“One night, he takes me to this club where she’s playing on Fifty-seventh Street. This guy he knows who works there is showing us to a table and Louis leans over to me and whispers, ‘After the set, you’re going back to meet Billie. We’re gonna make you famous. Tonight!’
“Well, I didn’t have any sketches of my work or photographs or anything with me. So I wasn’t feeling real grateful at first. Me and Louis started going back and forth at each other.” Mom stopped. She smiled, but not at me. With her legs crossed and a cigarette held up in the air, she was posing as if somebody’d been taking her picture the whole time she was supposed to be telling me her story. This was her interview, for magazine or newspaper, it probably didn’t matter, really. The important thing was she felt she deserved an audience of more than just me. For her, somebody else was in the room listening, taking it all down, so that it was as much history as any headline in the Daily News. Now I knew, but it still somehow felt private. I felt lucky she let me be there to hear it.
“Louis tore out of there. Jumped in a cab. Went home and got the photo album I’d put together showing half the women on Sugar Hill in my clothes. He was back before Billie even got onstage.
“After she finished, we had to to go around to the side entrance and wait for somebody to show me to her dressing room. I don’t know whether she knew I was waiting or not, but we stood out there in that alley for a half hour. I was so nervous, I went through my album three times, down on my hands and knees changing the pictures around in the dark.
“Billie had on a white satin robe like a prizefighter’s with makeup all over it. She said, ‘So you’re a dressmaker.’ I told her no, I was a designer. She laughed and said, ‘Hell, and I’m a jazz artist,’ real sarcastic. I was ready to leave then, without showing her my damn book, but she told me, ‘Take it easy, baby. I’m just trying to keep it light.’ She said she wanted to show me something a woman had made for her and ask me what I thought of it. She brought out a red one-shouldered gown with painted seashells glued in big circles on it and a split up the front.
“ ‘What kinda trip you think this bitch is on?’ Billie asked me. ’Cause you know ain’t no way in hell I’ll be wearin’ this bad joke anywhere.’ ”
Mom told me she made two dresses for Billie. “You want to see the pictures?” Yes, of course, I wanted to see the pictures. I wanted to see them all.
“I’m gonna dig them out for you. I will. Right after I feed Lorelle.”
But after she made lunch for Lorelle, somehow it was too late. The spell cast over the kitchen was gone. The interview was over. I’d have to wait for her to give another so I could ask her again about Billie and how she’d almost been famous.
5
Sixth grade. Social Studies. Joseph Monolucci stumbles through the end of the chapter called “Alaska and Its People: The Eskimos.” I’ve already turned the page to go over the words of the new chapter in case I’m called on to read. I’m the best in class at reading out loud. Even though mine is supposed to be the smartest sixth-grade class in the school, there are kids who have trouble with any words having more than two syllables. Or else they just read so slowly, Miss Murphy lets them get through a paragraph, says “Good,” and then calls on somebody else.
The new chapter is called “Africa and Its People: From Watusi to Pygmy.” My stomach knots when I see the black-and-white photographs of people who are practically naked, except for what look like rags tied around them. The photograph makes their skin look so dark it would be hard to make out their features if they weren’t all smiling. One picture is of three men who are taller and thinner than any man I’ve ever seen, black or white. There’s a photograph next to it of a white man, a woman and a child, all fully dressed. The little boy has on a Yankees baseball cap. Under the picture of the three tall black men it says, “Three African Watusis” and under the white people it says, “Average American Family.” The white man in the Average American Family picture comes up to the waist of the men in the Watusi photograph.
On the opposite page, there’s another picture of about ten or twelve black people who look like small children, except for four of them who have old faces. They are all smiling. Everyone in all of the pictures is smiling, except the Africans are showing their teeth and the Average American Family is smiling with their mouths closed. Under the picture of the black people who look like small children it says “Pygmy Family.” All the members of the Pygmy family are wearing diapers.
I’m still staring at the pictures, not paying attention to where the class is in the reading at all. I hear the word “Africa” a lot, so I know we haven’t finished the chapter. Miss Murphy is calling on me to read. She’s calling me Louie, which isn’t my name, but I’ve told her that a couple of times since the beginning of the term. Mom says white people always do that with a black person’s name, change it to something that sounds like nobody could take the person seriously. She asked me if I wanted her to come in and straighten Miss Murphy out, but I said no. She’d said something to Mr. D’Estephano at Parents’ Night last year about doing the same thing. The next morning he kept saying, “Louisss,” and hissing the s so loud, the other kids started to do it and it took a week before it stopped.
“Louie, are you daydreaming over there?”
Somebody giggles in the corner.
“No, Miss Murphy,” I answer. I look over at Peter Anatello to make sure I have the right page, but he moves his book so I can’t see it.
“We’re on page one-seventy-nine, Louie,” she says in a very low voice, talking between her teeth. “Right under the picture of the pygmies.”
I clear my throat, knowing I better make it a good reading. But Miss Murphy has started to laugh, so now I’m confused about whether she still wants me to read or not.
“Do you know why I’m laughing, class?” We’re all looking at her, but it doesn’t seem like anybody can guess the answer.
“I’m laughing because I was thinking how much you look like one of these little people here, Louie. One of these little pygmies.”
She barely gets it out before the whole class is shouting with laughter. Laughing like they did when she went out of the room, Mary Beth Savarrici went into the coatroom to get her lunch and David Pacerella locked her in. Or when Joseph Monolucci pulled the chair out from under Anita Collabella and the desk turned over on her, too. Laughing so loud Miss Murphy has to tell them to quiet down, not like she’s mad but like she doesn’t want anyone else to hear. Then she says, still smiling herself, “Did you figure out where we are yet, Louie?”
“Yes, Miss Murphy. I know where we are.” Even though I clear my throat, it comes out a whisper. I start to read and for the first time I’m not listening to myself. I’m just reading fast, hoping she’ll call somebody else’s name soon. By the time she does, it feels like I’ve been reading for about two hours.
I’m not sure whether I’m going to tell Mom about Miss Murphy saying I look like a pygmy or not. I know it would mean she’ll be in the principal’s office tomorrow for sure and then the whole school would know. It would only make it worse, like last year with Mr. D’Estephano.
But by the time the end of th
e day comes, the whole school knows anyway because about fifteen kids start chanting, “Louie, Louie, the pygmy, pygmy!” when I come out of the building. I know I’m supposed to punch at least one of them or as many as I can, but the last thing I want is to get beat up in front of everybody on top of everything else. There are about five boys I can see from where I’m standing who already call me Little Whitey because I’m the only black kid in my class. I can’t risk the pygmy story getting any bigger than it already is so I just keep walking toward home.
Mom has this way of seeing on my face if something is wrong and pushing me to tell her until I do. I don’t even get to the part about the kids outside school, which by now feels to me like the worst part. All she hears is the part about Miss Murphy saying I look like a pygmy and she’s not listening anymore. She’s on the phone, asking to speak to Mr. Kilgallen, the principal, and speaking in this voice that she always uses when she speaks to white people. The only white people she doesn’t use it on are the ones in the projects. The school secretary tells Mom Mr. Kilgallen has already left the building. For Mom, that only means tomorrow can’t come fast enough.
The next day she sends me to school at the regular time because she says she doesn’t want to embarass me by going with me. Instead, she leaves the apartment a minute after I do and follows me. I barely get to my classroom before I get called to Mr. Kilgallen’s office, where Mom is waiting with her head tilted so far up she looks like she has on an invisible neck brace. Mr. Kilgallen makes me repeat what Miss Murphy said about me looking like a pygmy.
After I do, Mom asks him, “Are you going to fire her now, or should I leave here and go directly to the Board of Education?”
I don’t hear what Mr. Kilgallen answers myself, because he tells me to go back to class then, but by the time I get home, Mom has called the Board of Education anyway.