But as soon as the fare and a little something extra jingled in Daddy’s pocket, he was back on the New York bus. This time he bought a job as a porter at the Theresa, the biggest and finest hotel in Harlem, and from this base he swaggered forth nightly in pursuit of his twin passions: jazz and jitterbugging. On a night when Coleman Hawkins was playing at the Savoy Ballroom, he eyed the girls without partners lined up against the walls and singled out one with high cheekbones.
Mommy always picked up on the story at this point. “This skinny little kid comes over and asks me to dance. I thought to myself I was crazy to give him the time of day, but okay. And, wow! Did he turn out to be a dancer! We jitterbugged like you wouldn’t believe—up, down, in, out, over the shoulder, through the legs. Oh, what a great time that was!”
Between sets, Daddy discovered that Mommy was also at the Hotel Theresa, working as a chambermaid. Her name was Itasker Frances Edmonds, and she too had dropped out of school that past fall. Itasker, however, had left school with passionate regret and much further along than the tenth grade. She had completed three years at Bluefield State Teachers College in West Virginia, where she had grown up, one of thirteen children of a coal miner who stretched his pay by growing potatoes and raising chickens, rabbits, and pigs. A self-ordained Baptist minister, her father lined up all the children every evening when he returned from the mine and whipped them, contending that each had more than likely done something wrong during the day when he hadn’t been there to see it.
The younger children tended to the farm chores, while the older boys followed their father into the mines. As for the older girls, since there wasn’t enough land to make it worthwhile to keep them home to farm, they were expected to marry and leave or find work and leave. When Itasker did neither but brewed the curious plan of going to college to become a teacher, her father, who could neither read nor write himself, merely nodded. He did not have to say the obvious: She would get no help from him.
Itasker, always called Tass, owed both her high cheekbones and her name to a Native-American great-grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee married to a Negro slave. By the time Tass was born, no one remembered what the great-grandmother’s name had been, but with a vague thought of acknowledging that admixture of different blood, her parents decided she should have an Indian name. The only one they knew was the name of a source of the Mississippi River, Lake Itasca, but they had heard it pronounced Itasker and that is the way they spelled it.
Less clear than the origin of Tass’s name was the genesis of her liking for poetry. If it could be traced to a particular teacher or book, Mommy never told us kids about it, only about her determination to go to Bluefield State Teachers College, a black college in West Virginia, and major in English. To earn her tuition, Tass worked in the school’s kitchen, scrubbing floors and scouring pots so large that she climbed inside them to scrape the sides down. This she did willingly for three years—and took it for granted she would do it for her senior year’s tuition as well. That last September, however, suddenly and unexpectedly she was informed that seniors were not permitted to work, that the jobs had to go to incoming students. Tass was directed to come up with the tuition or leave school.
Stunned and weeping, Tass called an older sister. “That’s okay, Tass,” Beatrice said reassuringly, “I’ll send the money so you can finish.” The college allowed Tass to stay on in an attic while she waited for the check to arrive—not attending classes, not studying, just waiting day after day. The check never came.
“I was brokenhearted,” Mommy said. “I’d worked so hard, I had an A average, I wanted so much to be a teacher, and here it was, all slipping away from me. I didn’t blame Beatrice. She didn’t want me to cry, so she told me she’d send the money, and she would have if she’d had it, but she just didn’t. But, oh, it was hard.”
Often enough, there were tears in Mommy’s eyes when she repeated this story, which she did to impress upon us how important it was to earn a diploma, because without it her three years of college had counted for nothing and she had had to earn her living as a cleaning woman. I understood that well enough, but what I secretly took away from the story was the conviction that I must never make a promise I cannot keep and I must keep every promise I make lest someone else suffer through the drying up of hope, as Mommy had done while she waited in that stifling, empty attic.
With no choice but to leave Bluefield, Mommy headed north. Another sister, Ellie, went with her. Their plan was to buy sailor suits, polish the song-and-dance routines they had invented for themselves as children, and earn money in show business. While they charmed club audiences at night, Tass imagined, she would attend a New York college during the day and earn her degree, Reality blew holes through their sails before the wind had a chance to fill them even once. New York City colleges laughed at Tass’s credits from Bluefield State Teachers College; she would have to start over again as a freshman. As for show business, that dream died when they saw their first show at the Apollo Theatre.
Even in East Beckley, West Virginia, Tass and Ellie had heard about Amateur Night at the Apollo. They pictured themselves winning the required four Wednesday nights in a row and being awarded a week’s paid engagement, thus launching their show business career. As it happened, on the Wednesday night they went, a female singer was trying for her fourth win. At the end of the evening, the MC held a white envelope with the prize money over the heads of each of the acts in turn, and when he came to the young singer, the audience screamed, shouted, whistled, and stomped. Flashbulbs went off. Reporters rushed up the aisles. A star named Ella Fitzgerald was being born, and the audience knew it. Tass and Ellie knew it—and knew, too, that they were out of their league. They found work scrubbing bathrooms at the Hotel Theresa.
So it was that Donald Thornton and Tass Edmonds met, first at the Savoy Ballroom and then in the back halls of the hotel, as Tass emptied wastebaskets and Donald emptied garbage pails, as Tass pushed a vacuum cleaner and Donald pushed a broom, as Tass polished tiles and Donald polished brass. They talked, they laughed, they shared sandwiches on the back stairs.
Donald commuted to Long Branch on weekends to reassure his mother he was all right, and one Sunday evening he returned to the city to find that Tass had been taken to Bellevue Hospital. A heavy period had turned into hemorrhaging, and she had had to have a transfusion. The sight of Tass lying still and drawn against the white sheets of a hospital bed rooted her unshakably in Donald’s heart as his to take care of.
Donald was sixteen years old. Tass was twenty-six. Years and years later, when I myself was grown, I discovered that Mommy had been born in 1915, Daddy in 1925; but whether Daddy was aware that the woman he had elected himself to guard, protect, and cherish was ten years older than he, I never knew. Perhaps not, for her age on their first child’s birth certificate was given as only two years more than his. In any event, it would have made no difference, for Donald loved Tass.
“It made me feel good, like a big man, to look after her,” he said, speaking of those times. “I liked having her need me. She was always like one of my children.”
For eighteen dollars a month, he rented a cold-water flat in a tenement and took Tass there when she left the hospital. For two years they lived and worked in Harlem. “When we had a nickel, we shared a hot dog,” Daddy said. “Sometimes we were so hungry we sucked each other’s thumbs.” When there was a knock on the door and Donald heard his mother’s voice, he would shout that he couldn’t find his pants and not open the door until Tass had had time to go out a window and up the fire escape to the roof. The two women never met, and if Donald’s mother suspected her son was not living alone, she could not prove it.
So determined was Donald to stick by Tass that when he turned eighteen on March 14, 1943, he ignored the draft notice that came. He and Tass were aware that World War II was on, but it did not seem to have much to do with them and they went about their lives as calmly as bottom-fish do with waves churning and crashing remotely above them.
In September a second draft notice arrived, and this one was too specific to be ignored, It ordered Donald Thornton to report on September 30 to have a physical and be inducted. On September 29, he and Tass went to a Woolworth’s on Lenox Avenue and bought a ring for $1.50. Then they stopped in at a little church and asked the minister to marry them.
“Tass, getting married is in case I die,” Donald told her. “Half the benefits will go to you and half to my mother. In the meantime, if you get in trouble or need any help, you go to my mother’s in Long Branch. She’ll take care of you.” Did he know then that Tass was pregnant? He never admitted it to us, his children, whom he daily, direly warned against “foolin’ ‘round” all through our childhood.
Tass’s sister Ellie had also married by this time, and after Donald left, Tass slept on a couch in Ellie’s flat for two months. Then she decided to go to Long Branch, to Donald’s family.
When she got off the bus, she observed with satisfaction that the Thornton house on Lippincott Avenue was solid and substantial: two stories plus an attic and cellar and a fenced-in yard. She knew from Donald that there were only four or five black families in Long Branch, which in the days before automobiles had been an oceanfront resort for the rich. Lillian Russell and Diamond Jim Brady, who rode in their carriage up and down Ocean Avenue, were the best known of the summer visitors. Woodrow Wilson’s summer White House, Shadow Lawn, now a college, was in a quiet part of town filled with large old houses, ancient trees, and landscaped grounds. The servants who staffed the houses and maintained the grounds lived, for the most part, in the black section of nearby Asbury Park, but somehow the Thornton family, which had been in New Jersey since long before the Civil War (Robert Carter of Nomony Hall, Westmoreland County, Virginia, in a deed of manumission dated August 1, 1791, freed his slaves, among them one Tom Thornton), had acquired this house in a middle-class neighborhood.
Tass rang the bell and was taken aback when the door was opened by a light-skinned, cold-eyed woman who was almost six feet tall. Donald, like Tass, had skin the color of dark chocolate, and he was short and stocky and friendly, the opposite of this unsmiling giant. Tass timidly introduced herself as Donald’s wife.
“No, you’re not,” the woman said flatly. “My son’s not married.”
Tass showed her the ring on her finger and the marriage license she was carrying in her pocketbook. While Donald’s mother stared at the license, searching for evidence that it was fraudulent, Tass explained that Donald, inducted into the Navy and now in training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois, had told her to go to his mother if she needed looking after and that she was five months pregnant, none too well, and unable to work.
The formidable woman finally allowed grudgingly, “All right, you can come in.” She clearly believed Tass had trapped her son into marriage through her pregnancy and Tass, not wanting to betray Donald, kept silent about the two rears she and Donald had been living together. She suspected that Nanna, as we were later to call our grandmother, had detected with one shrewd glance that Tass was older than Donald, which automatically gave her grounds for believing that Tass had led a young and credulous boy astray. Tass realized, too, because she was familiar with black mores, that Donald’s mother disapproved of her violently as a wife for her son because of Tass’s shade of darkness. In black circles, it is acceptable for women to marry darker than themselves, but men, to marry well, have to marry lighter than themselves. If Donald was really married to this woman, he had married beneath him.
Only Donald’s father, as dark as Donald, a squarely built, strong, sweet man thoroughly dominated by his queenly wife, welcomed Tass into the family. The others, Donald’s brothers and sisters, took their cue from their mother, as they were to do in most things all their lives, and set about despising Tass—to the extent that snapshots from that time have Tass’s face scratched out. In her misery in this hostile household, Tass slept with her marriage license under her pillow to remind her of Donald and reassure her.
One day the license was missing. Tass went to Nanna to ask if she’d seen it. Nanna pulled the ripped pieces from her skirt pocket. “Now you’re no longer married to my son,” she announced. “Get out of my house.”
Tass, now seven months pregnant and with complications that led to heavy bleeding, returned to her sister Ellie’s place in New York and stayed there until the baby was born. Donald was in the South Pacific when word reached him that he had a daughter. “We’d been moving up, moving up,” he remembered. “New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, New Hebrides. All of us blacks jammed in together. White officers. Fight, fight, victory, victory, that’s all we heard. I said to myself, Fight, fight, my eye. My wife’s had a little baby. I don’t want to die. I want to see that baby.”
He described how: “On one of them islands they got me in the hospital, and my papers had done caught up with me. You see, back in Great Lakes, I was supposed to go to the hospital and have my jawbone cut. They said I had malocclusion: my upper and lower teeth didn’t meet up with each other. But we was getting ready to ship out and I wanted to stay with the guys, so I acted like I wasn’t supposed to go to the hospital and I shipped out with my buddies. I didn’t get caught until New Hebrides. They looked at my papers and says, ‘You ain’t supposed to be over here anyhow.’
“A major says to me, ‘What we’re gonna do is send you back to Mobile 5, which is another hospital, and we’re gonna take an inch and a half of bone out of your face and you’ll be eating through a straw.’”
“ ‘Not me,’ says I.”
“ ‘You sadsack,’ he called me.
“I said, ‘Yes, sir, I may be that, but I still didn’t say you could cut my face.’”
“That made him mad, and he began filling out papers to send me back to the States. All the better, I says to myself. I’ll get to see my baby.”
In San Diego, in 1944, because he again refused surgery on his jaw, Donald was discharged from the Navy. The government provided one hundred and forty-eight dollars for a first-class, sleeper ticket to New York. Instead, Donald bought a coach ticket, planning to sit up for the four nights and have a hundred dollars in his pocket when he arrived back East. He had barely settled in a seat, however, when a porter came through and asked if he’d be interested in working his way to Chicago washing dishes for seven dollars a day, his meals, and a place to sleep. Working hard but eating and sleeping well, Donald arrived in Chicago, cashed in the unused part of his ticket, caught the Trailblazer to New York, and in New York, hailed a taxi.
He knocked on the door of Ellie’s apartment and Tass opened it. “Yes?” she said. “Hello,” Donald said, smiling as wide as it is possible to smile. When he had gone away a year earlier, Donald had weighed 140 pounds. He stood there now at 210 pounds. Tass said, “Yeah, what do you want?”
Donald reached for her hand. Her eyes, darkening with fear, shot to his face. Then, like footlights coming up in a theater, radiant recognition crept in. “Donald? Donald ... oh, Donald!”
He held her, hugged her, swung her, kissed her. “Now, where’s my other baby?” he said. “Where’s my Donna?”
He exulted to Tass that he had so much money in his pocket that she could go out and buy mud flaps for the baby’s carriage if she wanted. What she wanted, she answered with all the pent-up longing in her for a place of her own was a home for the two of them and the baby.
The next morning Donald rented an apartment at 75 East 119th Street for twenty-three dollars a month, and by nightfall had moved them in. The day after that, he had two jobs: one an eight-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week job in a commercial laundry, the other an eight-hour-a-night, five-night-a-week job in a meat-packing plant. On weekends, when the laundry was closed, he went into the building and cleaned the machines. Two jobs, sixteen hours a day, odd jobs on the weekend—it was a routine Daddy was to follow for the next twenty-five years.
Donna had been born in 1944. In 1945, Jeanette was born. In 1947, when Mommy was pregnant again, Daddy said, “If this o
ne isn’t a boy, I’m going to drown it, Tass, I swear.” It was not a boy. It was me, Yvonne, the third daughter, and Daddy arrived at Mommy’s bedside in Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center carrying a bucket with water sloshing in the bottom. Mommy heard the splashing and burst into tears.
Daddy grabbed her and held her close. “Oh, Tass, I was only funnin’,” he whispered. “She’s a sweet little girl. She’s got this little light spot on her cheek shaped like a cookie.” From then on, in the family, I was Cookie. Because something Daddy could not explain happened when he went to fetch Mommy and me home from the hospital, he sometimes said, “Whatever pertains to you, Cookie, it’s like there’s been a magic. Maybe it was luck sloshing around in that bucket and it splashed on you.”
Daddy had twenty dollars in his pocket when he went to collect Mommy and me. “When you’re poor, Cookie,” he explained when he told this story, “you always know exactly how much money you have, and I knew I had twenty dollars in my pocket. On my way to the hospital, it came to me that I better get something to keep the baby warm, so I stopped in a store and bought a blanket. It cost five dollars. Okay, so now I have fifteen dollars. I get to the hospital and tell them I’ve come for my wife and baby and they say I’ve got to pay them twenty dollars. I tell them I don’t have twenty dollars; I’ve only got fifteen. ‘Well,’ they say, ‘you can’t have your wife and baby until you get the other five dollars.’ I reached into my pocket to show them that fifteen is all I’ve got, and out comes twenty dollars. Now, where did that extra five dollars come from? From that day to this, I can’t tell you, Cookie, I only know it wasn’t there and then it was, and from that day to this, I’ve got to think there’s somehow magic mixed up with you.”
I loved the story. It’s been like an umbrella keeping the rain off my parade all my life. It is so wonderful for a child to grow up with a belief in her specialness, her luck, it provides such courage to risk, to overleap, that I have sometimes wished that all parents could tell comparable stories to their children, even if they have to invent them—stories to serve as a talisman all their lives.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 2