Dime didn’t know quite how to respond, although she thought there was something wrong with Nickel’s conclusion.
And so, their discovery of language was concluded in this way. Neither one had anything else to say, having reached a limit, a doll’s mind.
Brenda followed my hesitating finger, pointing up. Bolstered by my bubble gum, and feeling impish besides, I remarked around the wad, “I’ma get me some a those one day.”
Those were white bobby socks that hung clean as just bleached in a store plastic envelope. There were several packages there, all white. Brenda asked to know how much they were, and the son behind the cash box stood up and looked over his head, pulled down one of the plastic envelopes, and dropped it on the counter. It had a little ring in it, for hanging on a store peg, and the son threw his voice at us: fifty-nine cents.
Fifty-nine whole cents. Brenda felt powerful and gleeful that she had gotten me to name a want. She calculated that it was Friday and she’d get more money on Saturday, so she said she was going to get them for me—that we’d pretend it was my birthday, and she was buying me a present. She counted out five dimes, a nickel, four pennies exactly, and pushed them with her neat brown fingers across the counter to the cash-box son.
“It’s too much,” I whispered past my gum into her ear.
“I still got a dime,” she whispered back to me. “I never spend all my money.” She had already told me about the dimes she put away, at the beginning of each week in the mayonnaise jar with a slit cut in the top that she kept in her bedroom closet. Peckway’s son slid the bobby socks envelope toward her. Brenda picked them up and held them in two fingers. “May I have a bag, please?”
Every day Brenda performed some small ritual, solidly indicating she was familiar with purchasing. And today, buying this pretend birthday present, she was particularly puffed up and in charge.
She handed me the bag as we were walking out the store. I took it shyly. “It’s not my birfday, Brenda,” I said. “Why don’t you keep these? They nice.” I tried to press the small bag back into her hands.
There was humor in her eyes when she pushed them back to me. “No. It’s your pretend birthday, we made it up, Denise.” And, “Tomorrow my daddy will give me fifty cents, and we can have candy and cakes next week. Besides,” she trailed on, “Grandmama gets my socks at Hudson’s.”
“Oh,” I said.
We walked along chewing and listening to the scrunch of the bag swinging along until we got to where we took separate paths. “Will you remember I bought you a present and be my friend always?” she asked me.
“Uh-huh,” I smiled, sincere, and young enough still to promise.
“Even when we grown and wearing stockings?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” I smiled, giddy; she was so smart. She went her one way and I my other, and I considered one thing carefully: she never spends all her money.
My brother David is like that.
DAVID WORKED MORE or less like a farm animal to pile up the money he collected, and then hid. Up early, in late, knuckles more swollen every day.
People buy furniture all the time and what they buy from King Furniture, he delivers. Sometimes he come home and say his hand was smashed, and you look at it, and you see early signs of Mr. Howell Jones, or Mr. Watkins, or Big Jim. Images of old Negro men would flap like a flag, me applying iodine to a cut on David’s hand. He scarred: nicks and recollections of a dropped, too-heavy sofa, a metal door let go too soon.
My brothers are not looking up. Clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap. One’s vision is angling more and more toward the ground, and the other’s eyes are veiling with frivolity. There is the sound of wood slats clacking in my head, trying to get my attention. Clack clack clack clack clack clack clack.
He takes his baths in laundry detergent. He likes Snowy. He’d come in at night, throw out whatever remained inside his chest, leftover from the day, as a greeting to whoever happened to be in the house. Usually me. Courteous in spite of it, he’d ask if anybody need to use the bathroom, and then he’d go in and start to running the hot water. He sure did keep a box of soap powder right there by the tub. He dissolved every day in the bathwater, a wash strong enough for agitating clothes. He says he is dirty coming home.
He concerned me, drying out his skin so bad like that. He had bad habits about his care over all. He snapped the bumps on his face between his fingers. I kept telling him don’t handle his skin like it won’t get marred. Serena told him I was telling the truth. She told him he shouldn’t be pockmarking his face. She said if he ever wanted to change jobs, he was gone have a hard time. She said don’t nothing scare whitepeople more than a beat-up-looking Negro man. She told him she would still love him, however he ended up looking, but he should really think about what we said.
I was not the future wife, so I didn’t say much else about this. But Serena surprised me. What I thought she was gone say, with them religious skirts she wore, was that David should treat his body like a temple. Well, she didn’t say that. She said that David’s face was his investment in the work he did. It was not. David’s work was hauling. Didn’t nobody care how he look. Gloria Pearson said that Negro concentration in backbreaking labor came straight from slavery, but I couldn’t talk about that any further.
Well, like I said, I was not the wife. So Serena inherited all these problems that me and Serena, not David, defined. Including his shrinking-seeming. His shut-more-than-yesterday eyes. His bent-more-than-last-week head. His fantasies descending, dissolving with his days.
“How you feelin, David?” I’d ask him when he came from out the tub.
“Tired,” he’d say.
“YOU KNOW HOW to count, don’t you?” The man at Hudson’s who was hiring asked me this while he was writing my name down on the papers he had.
“Yes,” I answered, careful to push my teeth square together at the end.
“Count to fifty,” he said, writing.
After a minute, while I thought this through, I asked him, “Now?”
“Yes,” he answered, impatience in his voice.
To make up for the time I had made him wait, I started counting and got to fifty quick. So many fs with all the fours and forties. Missus Pearson said I was still much much too heavy on my fs. I concentrated hard on getting off the fs quickly, and on not going too slow what with all my other pronunciation concerns.
“OK, go on over by the red door and wait.”
The red door wasn’t ten feet away from where we were, so I stepped quietly over to it and wondered where it led. Did it go out? Was that where I would be going? Was he gone give me work so I could help with Christmas, and is that where the red door would take me, somewhere where there was work to get paid to do? I was careful not to lift my foot and scratch my other leg. Maybe he could see me sideways out his eyes. He said to the next girl, “Well, can you count?”
He picked me and another older girl whose name was Carole. “Go see Myrtle downstairs on the first floor,” he told us. We went down the stairs toward the back which was where his pointed finger at the end of his stuck-out arm showed that we should go. The store, that I had only seen from the front, coming in with Brenda or Margarete, turned out to have a whole back side. Two sets of stairs at either the right or left end. Depending on where you were going, you decided which steps to take. In general, the left steps was if you had to go down to the kitchen or up to the candy shop. Those were the two ends that marked that line. And the right end was really for if you had or wanted dry goods. That’s the side I used to collect my pins.
Half the day, the middle half, I spent boxing pins and buttons in small clear plastic boxes that had Hudson’s brand marked on it. The plastics were marked with Hudson’s prices and the number of pins or buttons inside, except they were empty, and the pins and buttons came in bulk. So we had these flat boxes with thousands of hair pins, bob pins, curler pins, and black or brown buttons inside. Long boxes the size of cookie sheets, about two or three inches deep. Carole
and I were to count the number of pins it said on the plastic and then shut the plastic up and put it in a display box. The display box was another clear plastic box, but deeper and long, like a roasting pan. We filled the display boxes with the counted pins and buttons. And then they took the display boxes out onto the floor and hung our plastic counteds on the spindles, Hudson’s brand for sale.
Most of the pin packets had fifty. The bob pins, the curler pins, and the safety pins. The button plastics had six buttons, both for the big and the small. Because the button plastics were so many and the buttons inside were so few, they took the longest to package up. Carole decided she wanted to do the buttons, she didn’t mind how slow they go. So I did all the pins. Roller clips is what the package called them; they were just like bob pins, but bigger. I did all those first, since they were for curlers that whiteladies wore. I thought I would get them out the way, so I would spend most of my time, or the last part of my time, working with things that sometime I might buy.
We packaged from about eleven o’clock till three o’clock. We had to be to work at eight, and we got off at five-thirty. During the week on the two days I went, I went in the afternoon, from two o’clock to five-thirty—and on those after-school days I didn’t do no packaging at all.
“Denise, I thought you wanted to concentrate on learning,” Miss Pearson said when I told her I had a job for the holiday at the downtown department store.
“I do,” I said. “I mean, I am. Miss Pearson, I ain’t doin nothin at that time a the afternoon except waitin for Clara to get hungry. Margarete said she would like for me to help with Christmas and she don’t have ideas for me to do things that much. She said I could go down to the department store with Brenda and get me a job, so I did.”
“Brenda Greenfield?”
“Yes,” I answered. I knew she would react like that. People always think that if Brenda Greenfield is doing something, it must be all right. I guess I ain’t no different—I am no different I mean—because Brenda told me all about the job, and I was so excited, and I made arrangements right away to get down there with her and see if I could get one. Brenda works hanging slips and dresses and putting gloves and socks on spindles downstairs back of the first floor. She does just the one thing all day on Saturday, and she doesn’t work on the weekdays because her grandmother says she has to concentrate on her high school work.
“What days does Brenda work?”
“Just Saturdays.”
“And what days are you working?”
“Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,” I answer.
“What do they have you doing?” Missus Pearson asks me. She is the first one to have asked.
“When I first get there and before I leave, I clean the toilets, and in between time, I package pins.”
Gloria’s face is a storm when she turns around from neatly wiping her blackboard down. Her eyes are shuttered. She wonders why she can’t teach my country behind anything.
“Miss Pearson,” I rush, a torrent of a speech. “I am only gone have the job until the day after Christmas. It’s just one month. I haven’t had the chance to earn any money since I been—since I have been up here. Margarete’s husband Jim gives me money but it’s for the food, for the dinners and the lunches I fix. I’m sure him and Margarete would give me some Christmas money, but I don’t want to ask them for Christmas money. I want to take the bus to the downtown store and earn my own Christmas money and buy what presents I want with the money I earned. When I was down home, I baked cakes and cookies for money at Christmas, and so for everybody that I didn’t want to give cakes or cookies to—like Margarete and my brothers and my Granma’am—I had a few dollars to spend on them. I’m just tryina get a few dollars a my own.”
Missus Pearson’s face did not change much while my voice took on the singsong of a plea. Why was I pleading with her, she would have very little say—especially now that I had already started—and Margarete had said what a help this would be, and Margarete had already asked if I wanted to buy the turkey for Christmas dinner, and I had already said I would.
“You’re excused, Denise.” Missus Pearson had sat down at her desk and opened her teacher’s notebook where she wrote down her grades and what she was gone teach on the next days.
“Missus Pearson, why you so mad? In a month I’m not gone have the job no more, and then on Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll be home doing work again, and while I have the job, I will do all my work on Mondays and Tuesdays and Fridays. You’ll see,” I said.
Missus Pearson laid her pencil down in a diagonal across her teacher’s book and folded her hands like she intended to say something calmly. She did not. “You will never get over being colored. You have no business down to that store,” she said. The fault in her English was like a chasm in the ground. “They got you in there cleaning toilets, making you a good little negress, and your mother’s response to it is that you should buy the Christmas turkey.” Her face is pinched like a rodent’s nose. “Well, this is certainly not what I intended for you, Denise. And I don’t think it is what your grandmother intended either. Your mother is very shortsighted about your future; I have told you that before.” She burrows. “You can be like her if you wish, but where you will find yourself when it’s over will be very close to where you are right now. Now, when you lift your hands and face and nose from the toilets, you can come back to see me. Until then, you are excused.”
I took my coat from Missus James off the chair and put it on. I picked up my few books from the front desk and tucked them into my elbow. I looked at Missus Pearson, who had slanted her back and head over her book. She leaned hard, at an angle, over her lovely wide brown desk. I blinked, accustomed to seeing her loving curve. I was clear, looking on, that she was waiting for me to leave. Although what was in the book held no interest for her right then, she would give me only the side of her face.
If there was anything I could have said to erase what she had said to me, I would have. If I could have changed the subject, I would have. If I had not gone through the toilet door with my youth and pails and rags, that would have been better. But now I wave the flag of dark and colored, and she and I witness it together.
“DON’T YOU WANT to know what they have me doing at the job?” Margarete and I were at the table with Clara, having string beans and cornbread for dinner.
“Yeah, what you doing?”
“Half the time I package pins, but first and then again before I leave, I clean the toilets.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Margarete looked up at me. Clara had held one string bean thirty minutes while we ate; she lives an infant’s life. There was challenge in my face.
“It’s not gone hurt you, Neesey,” she said. “This is just a little job for you to have over Christmas. Ain’t nobody touching you, are they?” she asked, and when I didn’t answer, she went on, “We all do work we don’t like; it won’t kill you.”
I had waited as long as possible to tell Missus Pearson about the Hudson’s job. Waiting didn’t do not one bit a good though, and it probably helped me do the exact wrong thing. And here she was mad as the dickens, acting like I was choosing Christmas money over her, which wasn’t so. Fact, if I hadn’t waited this long to tell her, I might have left Hudson’s when she got mad. But by then, I had to finish what I started. Margarete was counting on the money and I had not planned another way to get any Christmas things.
A letter came to the house; it had that drawn, luscious, teacher handwriting. I wanted to open it myself, but if Margarete found out I opened her mail she would not be sweet.
December 19, 1965
Mrs. Starks,
Will you please help? We need to try to find a way to encourage Denise to study. She does have good potential to advance. I have learned that she is working at the department store for the holidays. We all can use the extra money that extra hands can bring. I am concerned, however, that Denise may get distracted from her studies, which hold greater promises.
She does not have to face a future cleaning. Mrs. Starks, we have a shared responsibility for our children, and that is why I write you now. As her teacher, I am convinced she can have a good future. Negroes have many needs. She must devote herself to study and good practices, however. Do you and your husband agree? As far as I can tell, Denise understands all this and is trying, as she is able, to progress. Is there anything you want to discuss? Will you please stop by my classroom? If this is impossible, I will visit you; just send a message for an appointment by Denise.
Sincerely yours,
Gloria M. Pearson
Margarete does not like Gloria Pearson. She thinks she interferes. She thinks she is trying to tell her what to do. And who does she think she is anyway to try to tell her what to do? At least she didn’t come over. I asked Margarete if I could have the letter; I had read it standing at Margarete’s side. Margarete said, “You tell that teacher everything, Neesey?” and then, “No, you can’t have it; it was addressed to me.” She went into her room; I heard her pull out a bureau drawer. As soon as she left the next day, I located it, and read it again. I kept tabs on where the letter was for months, until spring; and then finally, I took it. Margarete had forgotten about it by then.
WE GOT PAID after two weeks, ten days before Christmas. I was so excited. The envelope was brought to me with my name typed on it! I happened to be packaging pins when the man brought the pay envelopes around. I put mine down at the bottom, under the sole of my foot, and slid my foot back into my shoe, even though Carole opened hers right away.
When I got home, I pulled out the envelope and opened it up. There was just a piece of paper inside.
I snatched it out and opened it up. PAY TO THE ORDER OF DENISE PALMS. What, What? PAY TO THE ORDER OF DENISE PALMS, and then below that, THE SUM OF FORTY FIVE DOLLARS AND CENTS.
I rushed to Margarete who was at the table with Big Jim. “What is this? What is this?” I repeat myself.
I have a temperature from confusion. I don’t know if I should be furious; I don’t know if I’ve been cheated. I know that I have not been studying. I have been cleaning toilets and dropping pins into plastic sacks, and in my pay envelope, which I have done all this for, there is a typed piece of paper and no money.
Good Negress Page 18