The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  When Daddy honked the horn for us at six o’clock, a wedge of little girls catapulted out of that house like missiles from a slingshot. The worst day of my life was the day I was in the bathroom at six o’clock and Daddy didn’t notice I was missing from the pack. I ran screaming down the street after his truck, but it turned the corner and disappeared from sight. One of my aunts dragged me, crying frantically, back to the house.

  “What’s the matter?” Uncle Kenny said. ‘“You can stay with us tonight, Cookie.”

  “Call Mommy! Call Daddy!” I pleaded. I was close enough to hysterics that finally Uncle Kenny did telephone. Daddy consigned me to hell by casually agreeing that the easiest thing was for me to stay where I was.

  I spent the night scrunched into the smallest, tightest ball I could manage in the corner of a bed that reeked of mouse droppings, feeling—or imagining, I didn’t know which—the light, quick feet of roaches rummaging in my hair and skimming across my face. It was a toss-up which was more horrible: the nightmare of lying awake in that bed or the nightmares that played out in the Grand Guignol theater of my mind when I dozed.

  After that experience, I felt doubly sorry for Rita, who was too little to go to school and had to spend all day at Nanna’s. As soon as she could walk and talk, Rita clung to the picket fence in the corner of Nanna’s yard every morning, yearning after us as we set out for school and plaintively begging, “Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me here!” We sympathized desperately but off we went to school, never absent and never late, so eager were we to be away from that house and that despotic woman, who, I suspect, never forgave us for being our mother’s dark daughters. Nanna was even harsher to Betty than she was to us. Betty was a foster child whom Nanna was being paid by the state to raise but whom, in reality, she used as a servant, although Betty was not much older than Donna. “Massage my feet, Betty,” Nanna would say. “Betty, give me my slippers.” “Get the witch hazel, Betty, and rub my back.” “Betty, get a bucket of water and clean up Bobbie.”

  Bobbie was another ward of the state boarded at Nanna’s, one for whom she received even more payment because Bobbie was severely handicapped. She had cerebral palsy, and Nanna kept her in a sort of cage, or pen, because Bobbie had no control of her arms and legs or her bodily functions. Whenever Bobbie soiled herself, Betty would be ordered into the cage to clean up after her.

  Even after Bobbie died, there was no letup in Betty’s chores, for Pretty Aunt Yvonne and Aunt Dollbaby Joy (neither of whom would answer unless addressed in exactly those terms) also used Betty to fetch and carry. Of the grown-ups, only Daddy treated Betty like a person with feelings. One day he spotted a long, broad, rawly oozing scrape on her leg and insisted on knowing how it had happened. When he discovered it had been caused by a boy pushing her over a desk, he boosted Betty into the front seat of his truck and drove up and down the neighborhood streets, all the while patiently arguing against her timid disinclination to identify the boy until, in a burst of courage, she pointed him out lounging on a street corner. Daddy stopped the truck, clamped his hand on the boy’s collar, bent him over his knee, and handed Betty a rolled umbrella.

  “Now,” he said, “you beat this rascal with that umbrella until you’re pretty sure he ain’t never gonna give you or any other girl such a shove again.”

  Betty, who had never once answered back in her life, never once fought back in her life, was slow to warm up, but then she made a satisfying job of it. After that, she worshipped Daddy, and since she was our age and we were with her so much and were so fond of her, we considered her our sister and Mommy and Daddy came to speak of having six daughters, as was eventually the case.

  We, of course, were desperately anxious to have the house finished so we would not have to stay at Nanna’s in the afternoon, but no snail could have been slower at constructing a shell than Daddy, who was able to lay blocks only on weekends, and not then if someone offered him an odd job that would bring in money. Daddy building the house was like a woman sewing her first dress; she’s been wearing dresses all her life so she has a pretty good idea of what one should look like, where the collar and the pockets and buttonholes properly go, but getting them all assembled without a hitch here, a pucker there, and an off-center seam down the back—well, that is a matter of experience that she doesn’t yet have. Daddy similarly lacked experience at building houses, so the house, although it was solid and still stands, had a homemade, somewhat improvised look.

  For one thing, the kitchen was located in the cellar. Even Daddy’s doggedness didn’t permit him to contemplate building a second story on the house, and with a living room, three bedrooms, and a bathroom having to go on the ground floor, he figured that the kitchen might best go in the necessary, but otherwise mostly wasted, space of the cellar. He built the kitchen entirely of brick, not just the floor and the walls but the bases for the sink and stove. He said he did this because brick never needed maintenance, but I suspect that seeing the mosquito-breeding water seeping through the foundation after every rain had given him the hint that a kitchen below ground might not always be perfectly dry, which proved to be the case. I remember us kids in bathing suits and Daddy in rubber boots sloshing around in the kitchen after spring storms.

  Because the stovetop was electric, I asked Daddy once if we weren’t in danger of being electrocuted. “No, Cookie,” he said. “I thought of that and had the guy run the wires overhead. There ain’t nothin’ electric closer to the floor than four feet.”

  The men Daddy worked with at Fort Monmouth listened to talk about the house while Daddy was building it, and when the time came, a co-worker who was an electrician and another who was a plumber volunteered to do the wiring and the plumbing. “You see how it is, kids,” Daddy said to us. “People aren’t gonna throw their time or money away on somebody who gets a bottle of Thunderbird wine and lies down on the Sidewalk, but if you show people you’re tryin’, they’re gonna want to help.”

  We children were too small to lend a hand, but sometimes a couple of us would carry one end of a plank while Daddy carried the other. In those days houses were dismantled by wrecking crews rather than being smashed to bits by machines, and Daddy, when he saw a house coming down, made a deal for usable lumber, which was then dumped on the front of our lot and had to be carried around to the rear. True to his philosophy of always thinking ahead, the same was true of logs when Daddy spotted a fallen tree being cut up.

  He told us, “This house has a fireplace because maybe there’ll be a time when we can’t right away come up with the money for heating oil, so then we got the fireplace to keep us warm.” Although I can’t remember it, years later he said that we did heat the house with wood the first few years we lived there, but I do remember the struggle to lug all the logs from the front to the backyard.

  There came a day, after four and a half years, when the house was completely roughed in, a roof on it, Sheetrock on the walls, subflooring laid. Was it sheer exuberance—I don’t know—but for the first and only time in our lives, Mommy and Daddy played with us. The heavy rope Daddy had been using to haul buckets of mortar to the top of the walls became a jump rope, with Mommy and Daddy swinging it while we kids ran in and out doing Double Dutch and Hot Pepper. When we faltered and that thick rope caught us on the legs, it raised such welts that by the end of the afternoon we looked like severely abused children, but we were so delighted to have our parents play that there wasn’t a murmur out of one of us.

  With the house recognizably a house and with the credibility of having had the persistence to build it, Daddy decided to try again for a mortgage. He went back to the same bank. It was four years later and Daddy was four years more experienced at dealing with people. Fort Monmouth had taught him what was expected from a black man, and time had shown him that he was willing to do it for the sake of his goal. He put on a suit and tie. He walked into the bank. He asked for the president. No, he didn’t want to be helped by an assistant manager. He would wait until the president was av
ailable to see him. So saying, he settled himself in a chair and folded his arms and looked serenely determined.

  When he was finally ushered into the president’s office, he waited respectfully until the president looked up from his papers. “Yes, Mr. Thornton, what can I do for you?”

  Daddy looked him straight in the eye so the president would see he was honest and then he lowered his eyes so the president would appreciate that he knew his place. “I wonder, sir, do you have children?” Daddy asked him. The president looked vaguely surprised. “I do.”

  “Then, sir, you’ll understand why I want to do good by my children. I have five little girls and I’ve built this house myself in this nice part of town so they can go to a good school. I’m a veteran and I’ve got two jobs and I’m workin’ hard ...” He was groveling and he knew it and he meant to, something we never realized until years later when we were grown and sat around talking about how it had all come about. He’d say then, “I have put up with so much stuff for you kids,” and he’d describe scenes like this and explain his thinking at the time—how you go to the top person because he doesn’t have anyone over him to cause him worry about making the wrong decision, how you establish your common humanity by talking about something you have in common like children, and how, when you get around to making your request, you switch to being humble so he can feel like a big man helping you.

  The bank president leaned grandly back in his chair and said, “What do you need, Mr. Thornton? What do you think you need?”

  “Well, sir, if you’d give me a mortgage on this house I’ve built, I could finish it up inside and payoff on the materials Mr. Calabretta done let me have on credit.”

  The bank president wasn’t so seduced that he didn’t check with his own eyes that the house on Ludlow Street was roofed and windowed and wired and plumbed, that it was substantial, and that final money really was needed for paint and trim and wall-to-wall carpeting over the plywood subflooring. Having verified all that, he issued an order for a mortgage to be granted to Donald Thornton, the first mortgage the Shadow Lawn Bank of Long Branch had ever granted to a black.

  There’s a postscript to the story. The man who originally refused Daddy the construction mortgage wrote him a letter of apology twenty years later when it became apparent what Daddy had accomplished. Daddy said the man did it to relieve his own mind. “He couldn’t wash it out. He couldn’t drink it out. He had to confess that what he had done was wrong. He had to say, ‘Hey, I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve what I did to you twenty years ago,’ so he could get back to feelin’ right with himself.” Perhaps contrition also played a part in the bank’s hiring one of Daddy’s nephews as its first black teller.

  With September coming around, Daddy decided we should move into the house before the inside was finished; indeed, it was several years before the Sheetrock walls received a coat of paint. Daddy went to the office of the manager at Seaview Manor and gave notice that the Thornton family was giving up its apartment in the project.

  “Where you going to?” the manager asked, somewhat surprised because people, once they were granted an apartment in the projects, were more than likely to stay put.

  “I built a house over to Ludlow Street,” said Daddy.

  “Get out! You built a house? Where’d you get the money to build a house?”

  The manager went to Ludlow Street later that day and peeked through a window of the house. ‘“There wasn’t nothin’ but a picture of Jesus tacked up on the wall,” Daddy laughed. “But your Mom and I were there cleaning up, getting it ready to move into, and we waved and he could see it really was ours.”

  My memory of the move is of a red saxophone, a tiny toy that Donna had gotten as the prize in a box of Cracker Jack. Mommy packed it, saying, “I want to save this,” as though she foresaw its importance as a family icon. All that was to come in our lives had its origins in that toy saxophone.

  When Donna won it as a prize in a box of Cracker Jack, she ran to Daddy to ask what it was called and how it was played. Daddy told her, and, a lover of jazz, he described how a fellow named Charlie Parker played a real one and made fantastic sounds come out of it. After that, Donna blew and blew on her toy, trying to make it produce wonderful sounds, and as young as she was and as careless as any child, she nevertheless didn’t let the little red saxophone out of her hands. “Daddy,” she begged, “get me a real one. I want to play a real one.”

  Donna was so insistent that Daddy began asking around and found that one of his buddies at Fort Monmouth had an old saxophone that Daddy could have for twenty-five dollars, payable at the rate of five dollars a week. When he laid his hands on the first five dollars, Daddy went around to Kenny Wright’s house, and Kenny brought the saxophone down from the attic. On the way home Daddy thought to himself: Gee, Kenny’s parents probably went through a lot to buy him a horn and pay for lessons, and now here he is, selling it out of the attic where it’s been laying who knows how long. I don’t want that to happen to me.

  “Anything that came to my attention,” Daddy always said, “I tried to think about it and see if it had something to tell me about my life.”

  He decided to take the saxophone back to Kenny Wright if Donna lost interest in it after a couple of days, but day after day Donna persisted in blowing on it, trying to force sounds out of it. The sounds she did get were so ghastly that Mommy and Daddy, who both had an ear for music and strong memories of Dizzy Gillespie at the Savoy Ballroom, felt they would go crazy if she didn’t get some instruction. They made a deal with Mr. Winthrop, the music teacher at Garfield School, to teach her for two dollars a half hour.

  And that is the way it all began.

  3

  Sweet and Sour Notes

  JEANETTE WENT ALONG when Mommy took Donna to her music lessons and very soon was announcing her determination to play an instrument too. Mr. Winthrop suggested the trumpet, but when Jeanette’s efforts to blow one produced little in the way of sound and much in the way of spittle flying in Mr. Winthrop’s face, he shifted his recommendation: “The guitar, I think, because the child has long and graceful fingers.” He introduced Jeanette to a guitar of his own, and when it became apparent that she did indeed have an affinity for the instrument, Daddy made a trip to the pawnshop in search of the money to buy her one.

  The only items he possessed that he thought might have some value—and it was more wishful thinking than conviction—were memorabilia brought home from the war. He spread the medals and buttons and buckles and a bayonet on the pawnshop counter. “Mr. Moss,” he said, “I’ve got five little girls and I’m tryin’ to do good by them. The oldest one, she’s learnin’ to play the saxophone, and my next, she’s beggin’ me to get her a guitar. Now, what do you think, can I get a bit of money for these here souvenirs?”

  Even Daddy didn’t expect he would be allowed more than ten dollars for his trophies, but Mr. Moss looked them over carefully and pronounced them worth sixty dollars. Daddy then visited Mr. Scott at the music store down the street and described his need for a guitar for his little girl. Mr. Scott found a fine one that he could discount to sixty dollars, explaining that he could afford to give Daddy a bargain because Daddy already bought reeds for Donna’s saxophone at his store and would be buying guitar strings there as well.

  Years later I listened to Daddy tell a young black man about those early times. “I think back when I hear guys like you saying ‘those white motherfuckers, those honkies, we should blow ‘em all away.’ These people, who happened to be white, they knew I was searchin’ for somethin’ and they was ready to help. So, when black people say whites are no good, don’t you listen. Yeah, there’s some out there that’ll put you on fire, but that’s not the people you look for. There’s a lotta good white people out there with good hearts. They know the struggle.”

  Daddy cobbled together two more odd jobs he could do on weekends to pay for the music lessons. Once I asked him why he worked on Sundays instead of going to church with us. “Cookie,” he s
aid, “you eat on Sundays just like any other day, so I work on Sundays just like any other day.” He was matter-of-fact, not sighing or sounding sorry or tired, I think because Daddy was a man lucky enough to know instinctively that work is not a burden but a boon, that it is work that builds a solid sense of self.

  For Mommy, because of her religious indoctrination by her hell-fire preacher of a father, Sundays were for churchgoing. She made sure we went to Sunday school, which was conducted in the basement of the Second Baptist Church on Liberty Street. Whenever Liberty or Lincoln is in a name, the street, school, or building is bound to be in a black neighborhood, and, for all I know, that may be true of Second Baptist, too, because when I asked Daddy what happened to the First Baptist church, he said “White folks got that. Coloreds get the Second Baptist churches.” Daddy didn’t care for churches—“Religion is in your heart”—and he argued with Mommy that he did not want people talking to his kids on Sunday who would get in the way of his doing good by his children on Monday. But Mommy, who didn’t often argue with him, quietly said, “Donald, I want them to go,” and that settled that.

  Because Mommy made no distinction between everyday schoolwork and Sunday schoolwork, insisting that we study as hard for one as for the other, we could be counted on to have memorized the lesson and we were called on often to recite and to read the Bible stories aloud. Except for one Sunday when a newcomer appeared in the doorway of my class, a pretty girl just up from the South. “Little Miss Sunshine,” purred our black teacher. “Come in, come in. Sit here by me.”

  “How come?” I asked Mommy when I got home, describing how I knew the lesson but wasn’t called on once, how it was all: “We’ll let Little Miss Sunshine do this. We’ll let Little Miss Sunshine read that.” Mommy asked what the newcomer looked like, and when I said she was light-skinned, much lighter than the rest of us, Mommy nodded. “High yell a,” she said. “That’s why the teacher favored her.”