The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  “I was driving and I blew the horn and Betty’s mother came out. My mother said, ‘We brought your little girl around so you could see her.’ The woman glanced in the car at Betty, turned and stalked back into the house, and slammed the door. Now, I was young—it was before I was married—but I said to myself, ‘How can anybody do this to a little child? How can ‘anybody do this to a baby?’”

  When Nanna died the child welfare system offered anyone in the family the option of keeping Betty. All the aunts and uncles announced they wanted her, but Daddy knew they would use Betty as a servant just as Nanna had, so he said he would take her. “You’ve got all those girls already, Donald,” they objected.

  “Let Betty decide,” Daddy said. “Let her say where she wants to go.”

  “With Donald,” Betty whispered. “I want to go with Donald.” Cowed by years of browbeating, of being told she was stupid and worthless, Betty had just enough spark to stick to her decision when the child welfare representative questioned whether she wouldn’t be wiser to go where there were fewer children and a larger house. The representative then had to investigate whether the house and people were fit to have her.

  “Mr. Thornton,” said the investigator, “you already have five daughters.”

  “I do,” he said, “and you look at my daughters and you won’t see none of ‘em in turned-over shoes or actin’ unmannerly or lookin’ nothin’ but healthy.”

  “‘Your sister wants Betty and she can do more for her than you can afford to.”

  Daddy started to say, My sister don’t mean Betty no good, but he told himself he couldn’t rat on his sister, so he said instead, “I can handle another girl. I can give Betty a carin’ home. I want to put her back in school.”

  Daddy told us, “I think it was my sayin’ I wanted to put Betty back in school that made up the lady’s mind. Plus I told her that Betty only had a certain length of time before she would be ready to be a wife and she hadn’t oughta be goin’ into marriage thinkin’, ‘Nobody loves me. They can do this to me, they can do that to me, and I got no right to stick up for myself.’ Those thoughts hadn’t oughta be there, and if it was God’s will, I wasn’t gonna let ‘em be there.”

  Daddy went on: “People aren’t dumb, specially the state. They figured, Hey, this guy here, maybe he wants to do right for Betty, and they said, ‘Okay, but you got to have three or four references and a blood test and a chest X-ray; I thought, what the heck is this? I got five kids at home already and I didn’t need to get a blood test. But I went to the hospital and went through this, and I put down the banks I owed money to and the pawnshop where I pawn my stuff when I need money and the Second Baptist church ‘cause you have to go to church if you’re gonna take a child.

  “So after a while the lady from the state, she called me up and she says, ‘Mr. Thornton, everyone gave you a wonderful character reference, but I’m gonna tell you something—maybe I shouldn’t but I’m gonna tell you anyhow. The only one you got to watch out for is Reverend Williams. He talked about you like you were a dog. He said you didn’t send your kids to church and he didn’t think it would be a nice home for Betty to go to because you’re not a religious family. But you know what we decided? We’ve decided to send Betty to your house anyway.’ I said, ‘Thank you very much. Now I got six daughters.’”

  The role of self-effacing caregiver had been laid out for Betty by Nanna. It was what she knew how to do and she did it automatically. But when Daddy found her slipping into the same subservient role in our house, he called an immediate halt to it. We were older by then and took turns drying the dishes after dinner, but there came a Thursday followed by a Friday on which Betty was drying the dishes both nights. “Betty,” Daddy hollered, “didn’t I see you dryin’ last night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then it can’t be your turn tonight. Whose turn is it?” No one answered, so then he really bellowed. “WHOSE NIGHT IS IT?”

  “Jeanette’s,” Donna told him.

  “Jeanette, if you don’t get yourself down here, I’ll pick up this shoe and I’ll… Betty, you get upstairs.”

  One night Daddy came home and Betty wasn’t there. Mommy explained that his brothers had called and wanted her at their house. “They did, eh?” Daddy said, and wheeled and marched over to what we still referred to as Nanna’s house. He was yelling at Betty when he walked in the door. “What’re you doin’ here? If you don’t get up and get out of here and get back home...!” Betty was already up and running out the door as Donald turned on his brothers. “You take care of your house and yourselves,” he told them. “I’m takin’ care of Betty.”

  Daddy was driving an oil truck then, and soon after Betty came to us, he hoisted her up on the front seat beside him and drove her to school. The two went to the principal’s office. “Betty’s one of my girls now and I want her in school,” he announced. He was prepared to argue, but the principal volunteered that they were only too glad to have Betty back. “Not in the stupid class,” Daddy said. “My mother’s been callin’ her dumb all her life, but Betty’s not dumb. My wife and my girls’ll help her till she catches up.”

  Betty went on to graduate from high school. But long before that, Daddy, who believed in setting goals, discussed her plans with her. Coaxed to express her wishes, Betty guessed that she liked taking care of people. Instead of saying, “Well, you can become a day worker,” Daddy suggested, “Why don’t you become a nurse?”

  “I think I’d like that,” Betty admitted, and that is what happened. She became a licensed practical nurse and went to work at Monmouth Medical Center. When, at twenty-two, Betty married, Daddy gave her a wedding reception at the Garfield-Grant Hotel in the center of town. The social worker who had placed her with Daddy stood up at the dinner and made a little speech about Betty’s godfather, Mr. Thornton, who put her back in school and encouraged her to enter a profession and now was giving her this lovely reception to celebrate her wedding. The social worker had given Daddy a wink when she started to speak, and when she said these things, she was looking right at the Reverend C. P. Williams, who was sitting there stuffing himself with veal at a feast paid for by the man he had said was a heathen and not fit to provide a good Christian home for Betty.

  But long before all this came to pass, we loved having Betty with us because she had always seemed like a sister to us and she was another person in our circle. Daddy didn’t like us to have friends. If one of us started a sentence with: “My girlfriend…” Daddy interrupted.

  “What girlfriend? You mean your sister?”

  “No…”

  “Your sister?”

  “Oh, yeah, my sister,” we would give in, knowing that Daddy wanted us to stick together, not to go outside the family.

  “That’s what you got the music for, so you can be playin’ with each other.”

  “But, Daddy, what if we want to play with dolls?”

  “No dolls! I don’t want’ you playin’ with dolls, you hear?” He wouldn’t allow a doll in the house. “Girls get dolls,” he said, “and as soon as they get big enough to have babies, the doll baby picture comes back and they have a baby. There’s a time for babies. Now’s the time for learnin’, for getting’ your music. We’re a poor family so we got to know which way we’re goin’.”

  That they could have babies at fifteen was a big disadvantage of girls, in Daddy’s opinion. On the other hand, he had discovered a real advantage to them. As he later said: “Girls are very determined to win and keep the love of their daddy. For me to smile was like Santa Claus coming to a child on Christmas. When I was frownin’, they begged me, ‘Daddy, what’s the matter?’ I wouldn’t tell them. ‘Daddy, please tell us what’s the matter.’ I’d say, ‘You’ve been bad girls.’ ‘Daddy, we’ll be good. Just talk to us. Just smile.’ And when I’d smile, they’d say with satisfaction, ‘Daddy’s happy.’ A beating only matters to a child when you’re beating them. But when one of my girls said, ‘Daddy?’ and I said sternly, ‘Yes?’ instead of,
‘What you want, sugar?’ they didn’t like that. So then I told them, ‘You want me to be a good daddy, you got to be a good daughter.’

  “I told them, never ask of a person what you can’t give of yourself. In other words, if you expect me to be nice and give you the things you want, you got to be nice and give me what I want. I want you to study. I want you to do good by your music lessons.”

  One day I came home from school and bragged, “Daddy, I got an A.”

  “That’s good, Cookie.”

  “That’s all you’re gonna say, Daddy?”

  “Well, there’s A+, isn’t there?”

  So then I came home with an A+ and he said, “Very good, honey. Now get A+ +.” He wasn’t being harsh. He knew that, as black children, we had a long, long way to go, and he believed that, “When you reach the point where you think you got it, you lose it. You’ve always got to keep in your mind that there’s more to be grasped.”

  He never made the mistake of thinking that his daughters were geniuses. He always said we were just average, run-of-the-mill children, nothing smart, nothing brilliant about us. “But,” he said, “they are children given the chances that every child should be given. When people say they aren’t smart like my kids and so they can’t do what my kids are doing, I tell them they’re wrong. If you want to do it, if you put your mind and your thoughts and your heart and your soul to it, you’ll do it. It’s when you don’t want to be bothered to work hard that you’ll find all kinds of excuses.”

  Daddy was like the coach of an all-girls’ team, motivating, punishing, rewarding, pushing sternly, and prodding gently; never letting us forget that our ultimate aim in life was to become doctors and giving us nearer goals, like A + + +, to shoot for along the way. To give us goals in music, every several months he would scrape together a hundred dollars to pay for us to make a record at the Bell Sound Studios on West 54th Street in New York City. The record was never intended for sale or for any other purpose than to let us hear our own progress, to provide us with evidence that we were getting better, that all the practicing was paying off.

  We practiced in the late afternoons after we had straightened up the house and finished our homework. Mommy would come home from Mrs. Egan’s. Dead-tired, she’d slump down on the couch and say, “Play ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ for me, kids,” and we would and she’d fall asleep. We figured we weren’t hitting any sour notes if she could sleep like that, but maybe it was just that she was so exhausted.

  A few years later, she began working as a presser in a garment factory in Long Branch. For a while she had done piecework sewing. She would bring home a big bag of material for cuffs and pockets, and we would help her with the sewing, but when she found that pressers made much more money, she went to work on the steam machines in the factory.

  Daddy kept asking, “Tass, why are you getting’ so thin?” “Because of sweating so much at that pressing machine,” she’d tell him.

  Daddy got angry one day. “Enough of that stuff! How many times I got to tell you to quit?”

  But Mommy liked to have her own money. If she asked Daddy for a dollar to buy a pair of stockings, he would say okay, but then he’d fish around and fish around in his pockets until he’d put together ninety-nine cents, and he’d say, “Here. You can find another penny somewhere.”

  He would do the same thing to us kids. We’d say, “Daddy, the school pictures cost two dollars,” and he’d go in his pocket and come up with a dollar. “Daddy, they cost two dollars.” He would root around some more and find a quarter, then he’d pick the lint off a nickel, and scratch around and there’d be a dime, and finally he’d get up $1.97 and hand it over, saying, “You can find three cents someplace, kids.”

  If you came back and said, “Daddy, I can’t. I can’t find a single cent,” he’d say, “Okay, I just found a couple of pennies,” and he would hand them over and now you had enough, but the whole process was agonizing.

  We were poor, of course, but I don’t think it was that so much as he loved having all of us dependent on him. “Donald and his six splits” could just as well have been “Donald and his six spokes,” with Daddy as the hub of the wheel around which we all revolved.

  Whether it was conscious or not, I think another way of keeping us dependent on him was by making us fat. He had a lunch break at three o’clock in the morning from his all-night shift at Fort Monmouth, and he would scoot home and wake us up. “Hey, kids, Daddy’s home. Daddy’s got blueberry pie for you.” He would cut big wedges from a leftover pie he had been given by a friend who worked in the mess hall, pile ice cream on the slices, and wave the plates under our noses.

  “Is it fattening, Daddy?”

  “Naw, it’s good for you.”

  If he thought he detected a slackening off in appetite, he insisted we take something called Father John’s Tonic. The predictable consequence was that, except for Jeanette, we were all heavy. Linda in particular was a very fat little girl. But that was fine with Daddy because he figured that the more overweight we became, the less attractive we would be to boys.

  Mommy came home from a PTA meeting one evening and mentioned that someone’s child had played a piano piece. “You tell them that at the next meeting the Thornettes’ll play,” Daddy said.

  “What’s the Thornettes, Daddy?”

  “That’s you, kids. You can play ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ for them like you do for Mommy.”

  An almost solidly white PTA audience responded delightedly to four plump little black schoolgirls solemnly playing “Some Enchanted Evening” with grace and feeling and not a single wrong note, and we were immediately invited to play for a PTA fund-raising dance. Our instructors from the Army band provided us with what musicians call “the fake book”, a collection of all the standard songs, with parts for the saxophone, piano, guitar, etc. Daddy made us music stands out of cardboard boxes, and with the fake books propped in front of us, our musical training was so good that we could sight-read any song that was requested. With Linda on the drums providing a gentle, swishing, rustling, whispering background beat, the Thornettes were a combo easy to listen and dance to.

  It was 1955. Linda was six, I was eight, Jeanette ten, and Donna eleven. Were we paid for the many PTA meetings and dances we played at? I don’t know. Money was Daddy’s province. It went into his pocket; it came out of his pocket. He ran the family.

  Perhaps he thought the Thornettes needed a piano player or perhaps he just wanted to be part of the music. In any event, he decided that he would learn the piano. He bought one on time for thirteen dollars a month and hired a German woman married to an American soldier to come to the house to teach him.

  As he remembered it, “This lady is tellin’ me what I got to do, and I’m tellin’ her, ‘You mean, all my fingers got to move that way?’ So I knew I couldn’t do that. So I’m look in’ over at Rita, my youngest, who’s sittin’ there, and I says, ‘Maybe you ought to try to teach my daughter.’ The teacher says, ‘How old is she? Four? Wait another six months until she starts school, then I’ll take her.’ After six months I contacted her again to have her start givin’ Rita music. She said Rita’s fingers were too small to hit the keys, but she’d try. And Rita took to it. I mean, her four sisters were the Thornettes and Daddy was takin’ them to play Friday nights at the canteen at Fort Monmouth and Saturday nights to the Elks Club in Asbury Park and the soldiers was comin’ to give them lessons and write arrangements for the band, and you can bet she wanted to be a part of that.”

  Somehow we kids heard that the Paramount Theatre in Long Branch had an amateur show every week and that the prize for coming in first was a radio, exactly what Mommy would love to have for the mantel over the fireplace in our living room. We made plans to enter the contest and win it as a surprise for her. We enlisted the help of our grandfather, who owned a pickup truck and promised to deliver the drums and our instruments and us to the theater, and we practiced “Rock Around the Clock,” the song by Bill Haley and the Comets that ush
ered in the rock and roll era.

  We were confident we would win because we had been playing in public for a couple of years, everybody loved us, and we could hear from the records Daddy took us to New York to make that, once we started to get good, we had gotten really good fast. But we lost. A little girl twirling a baton came in first. “How come?” we asked our grandfather as we left by the stage door, “She wasn’t as good as we were.”

  Grandfather jerked his head in the direction of the little girl’s mother, who was whispering head-to-head with the theater manager. This was our introduction to the notion that the world is not necessarily a fair place. We were terribly disappointed not to capture the radio for Mommy, but we felt good about what we had done. Before this, it was Mommy and Daddy taking us to the PTA meeting, taking us to the Elks Club. This time it was like: Here we are, We’re doing it! We’re good. It didn’t work out, but, hey, we’re on our way.

  When we practiced now, particularly something like “Shout” by the Isley Brothers or “I Feel Good” by James Brown, all up and down the street people opened their windows and danced in their living rooms or out on the sidewalk, as though they couldn’t help it, as though the music got in their feet and they just had to move. When Daddy saw that, he began hiring a hall and charging admission for Saturday night dances. Because he was always food oriented, he would make up big batches of sausage and meatballs in tomato sauce to sell in the back of the hall, and in between sets we’d be back there helping him serve up the plates. We never said no when he told us to do something. We never even questioned it. Daddy said this was a way of making money, and we just went ahead and did it.

  He made one more attempt at becoming part of the band himself. He decided he would play the bass. This was the late 1950s when electric bass guitars had come on the market, but Daddy wanted a jazz bass, the upright acoustic bass with four strings and no frets, like a cello—the most difficult kind to play. As usual, he found a first-rate instructor to come to the house. All through those years, from the time I was nine until I was in highschool, he had serious musicians coming every Saturday to teach us. Reuben Phillips, who conducted the Apollo Theatre orchestra, made arrangements and wrote original compositions for us. Another fellow, who had gotten out of the army and was teaching at Juilliard, worked with us on counterpoint and composition. Again, I don’t know how or whether Daddy paid them. All I know is that he was a master at persuading people to do what he wanted them to do.