The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  He reappeared in the living room. “Don’t any of you let them in any other door either,” he said, glowering, and left for work.

  When he returned at six the next morning, Donna and Jeanette and Mommy were huddled in blankets on the front porch. Mommy had not dared let the girls in but neither had she felt safe having them stay outside alone.

  The ensuing row might have been worse if it had not been that Donna and Jeanette, unbeknownst to Daddy, had been accepted at Howard University. It was midsummer and they figured there was no point in bucking him since they would soon be off to Washington, D.C., free and on their own.

  Almost a year earlier, the two of them had applied to Howard with Daddy’s knowledge and approval because he was determined to have his daughters go to college—whatever college was; he was none too clear about that and he hadn’t given any thought to where Howard was or what it was like. But then came the Princeton date, other dates followed, the band was making money, and Donna and Jeanette were afraid that if Daddy got wind of the fact that they’d be leaving the band, he’d interfere with their plans.

  They stopped talking about Howard, and when he asked, they said, “Well, we don’t know, Daddy. Word hasn’t come through yet.” Donna had saved money from working all year and Jeanette had been awarded a scholarship, so they figured they could swing college on their own if, at the last minute, Daddy refused them tuition money. They bought new red Samsonite luggage, and in August, with their suitcases packed, they told him.

  He stared at them. “You’re not goin’,” he announced flatly. “How you gonna play in the band if you’re … where? Washington, D.C.?”

  “We’ll have to let the band go.”

  “You’re gonna take what the band’s made and leave your sisters with nothin’ for them to become doctors on?”

  “But, Daddy, you want us to go to college.”

  “The young ones is payin’ for you now; you gotta be around to pay for them later. Anyway, Howard’s a black college, ain’t it? You go to a black college and people’ll think it’s because you’re too dumb to get into a white one. The rest of your life you’re gonna be apologizin’ for goin’ to a black college.”

  “Daddy, do you want us to get an education? Do you want us to be doctors?”

  “Ain’t I said that from the beginning?”

  “Then we have to go to Howard. It’s too late to get in anywhere else.”

  “Well, let me see about that,” he said. “I’ll just ask around.”

  Donna and Jeanette imagined they had won because a college that was closer, like Rutgers, would be certain not to accept them only two weeks before the fall term started. They were smiling and laughing and talking about the boys they were going to meet and how delicious the freedom of not having Mr. Clean stand over them would be. Even when Daddy came home with the news that there was a college right in West Long Branch, so close they could walk to it, they were not disconcerted.

  “We know that,” they said dismissively. “But Monmouth College is a teachers college.”

  “College is college,” Daddy insisted, and they did not argue or bother to explain that a teachers college is not where you go to take a premed course because they knew acceptances had gone out and enrollment had been closed months before. “Don’t worry about that,” Daddy said. “I’ll just go over and talk to the president.”

  “If he says no, can we go to Howard?”

  “He ain’t gonna tell me no.”

  “But if he does, can we?”

  “I s’pose you’ll have to,” he admitted grudgingly.

  Again, they thought they had won.

  Daddy put on a white shirt and tie. He put on the one suit he owned, and when he went out the front door, Jeanette giggled. “The president of a college won’t give him the time of day. Anyway, he’ll probably end up at the Star Laundry. He doesn’t know a college from a hole in the ground.”

  They should have known better than to underestimate Daddy. He drove through the massive iron gates of the college, up the winding drive to Shadow Lawn, the mansion that was the main building of the recently founded college, parked the van in front, and inquired the way to the president’s office, where a secretary asked if he had come about some work or about payment of a bill.

  “It’s about two of my daughters,” Daddy said. “I need them to go to college here.”

  There was something about Daddy—a solidity, a sincerity, a simplicity—that opened doors. He gave the impression of courteous determination: he would cause no trouble, raise no fuss, but he would remain until he saw the person he had come to see. In a surprisingly short time, the secretary showed him into the president’s office. The president shook his hand and asked what he could do for him.

  “I live in Long Branch, I work at Fort Monmouth, I’m a veteran, and I’ve got five daughters,” Daddy offered calmly. “Now I see by the pictures on your desk that you’re a family man, too. Am I right?”

  The president agreed, and in response to Daddy’s warm questions, he, attached names and ages to the photographs of his children and mentioned something about their talents and interests.

  Telling us about the interview later, Daddy said this was the moment when he knew he was going to win. “Now I got him. Now when I talk about my children, he’s got to see himself in me. When I tell him I want to keep my family together, he’s got to understand my feeling. He can’t help hisself. He knows he isn’t talkin’ to some kid that he can tell, ‘Sorry but you didn’t do whatever in time. You don’t meet whatever you gotta meet to get into college here.’ He’s talkin’ to another man about his children. He isn’t behind his big desk anymore. I’ve brought him around to my side. I’ve put him in my shoes.”

  The acceptance letters admitting Donna and Jeanette to Monmouth College arrived two days later.

  Jeanette screamed and raged. Donna wept and pleaded. They shut themselves in their room and moaned and hollered. Daddy admitted to feeling sorry for them. “But,” he said, “God must have meant for it to be because if Monmouth College wasn’t there, they’d have had to go to Howard.”

  Jeanette yelled through the door at him. “It’s a teachers college! I don’t want to be a teacher!”

  “I told the president I wanted my daughters to be doctors,” Daddy answered complacently. “They have everything you need, he said. They have liberal arts courses…”

  “Liberal arts isn’t for being a doctor!”

  “They got biology. They’re a private college, but that’s okay, we’ll get the money up. I’ll get a loan.”

  The answer was a long, despairing wail. Mommy was the one who finally persuaded Donna and Jeanette to open their door. “We understand,” she told them. “Daddy and I understand, but it’s the band that’s going to pay for you going to college, and it’s the band that has to pay so your sisters can go, too.” She did not say that they were being selfish, but that was hidden in her words and Donna and Jeanette felt it. Donna admitted to me later, “We really did feel bad about leaving you kids and the band.”

  “Even though,” Jeanette added bitterly, “it was going to be party time in Washington, D.C.”

  Donna and Jeanette started college, I was a junior in high school, Linda was a freshman, and Rita was in the sixth grade. Late Friday afternoon Daddy would plunge through the front door yelling, “How come you’re not ready? Where are your dresses? Why aren’t the instruments out? Come on, we can’t be operatin’ on CPT.” CPT—colored people’s time, he called it, an hour behind everyone else’s time. Even though he was hollering at us, he himself was the worst offender; he was always running late.

  “Daddy,” I’d say, “we aren’t going to make Princeton by nine o’clock.”

  “Tell you what we’ll do, Cookie. We tell them we’re takin’ our twenty-minute break first. Then we’ll get set up and play until ten o’clock.” Other bands started at nine, played for forty minutes, then broke for twenty, but we were usually doing it the other way around because of being on CPT.
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  Daddy never spoke about money to us, neither about what was coming in nor what was going out, but he did say that he often spent the money from a gig before we made it. The expenses were high: top-of-the-line instruments for all of us, such as Selmer Mark VI tenor and alto saxophones, a Fender “Jaguar” guitar, Rogers drums; material for the dresses Mommy made, which got to be a bigger and bigger item as we went to costume changes and ever more elegant material; six pairs of matching shoes for every outfit; the best amplifiers, plus speakers in case: the college speakers shorted out—because, said Daddy, “When you’re all set up and they turn on the P.A. system and nothin’ comes out, man, that’s a bad feelin’.” We needed reeds and Otto Link mouthpieces for the saxophones, which were overhauled regularly by an expert in Asbury Park to keep them in tiptop condition. The drums frequently had to be reskinned. Electronic keyboards were just coming out, and we carried an extra one of those for backup. It all added up.

  “We can’t go to colleges lookin’ raggedy” Daddy said. “These are kids from wealthy families. They’re used to things lookin’ good, and we’re there to give them a show, so everything’s gotta be first class.”

  With our clothes, the instruments, the amplifiers, and seven hefty people in the car, the weight in the old white van was almost more than it could manage. Blowouts were so frequent that we were forbidden to open a can of soda without telling Daddy that we were about to pull a pop-top because the sound of psssssst made him fearful that yet another tire had burst.

  One time in the winter we were headed up to New Haven. An agent had called and asked us to substitute at a Yale weekend for Jerry Lee Lewis, who had come down with the flu. It was snowing, and the car was making a funny sound, like a rhythmic flub, flub, flub. “Oh, God,” Daddy kept saying, “we got to make it. We can’t miss this money.”

  He knew every sound the car made; he knew if a spark plug misfired, so he knew something was wrong. Finally he couldn’t stand the anxiety of fearing the car was going to break down any minute. He got out, lay down on his back in the snow, and slid under the car. He looked and looked. Finally he spotted the trouble. All it was, was that a piece of the recap on a tire had come loose and was thumping against the fender. “Oh, I’m so glad, so glad,” he kept saying as he took his knife and cut it off. And after we played at Yale and were headed for home, he exulted, “I don’t care if all the tires blowout now. We got the money.”

  The loaded van couldn’t make any speed, and when trucks thundered past us, it rocked and swayed and vibrated so much, especially on the narrow mountain roads in West Virginia, that we would be saying, “Oh, Daddy, we’re going to die trying to get some money.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “one of these days we got to get us something more streamlined that cuts through the wind.”

  But what really made him decide to buy a new car was a time we were heading for a date at the University of North Carolina. It was late at night and I was dozing when I heard Daddy whisper to Mommy, “There’s somebody followin’ us.” That brought me wide awake, and I soon saw what he meant. When we turned left, the big pickup truck behind us turned left, right, and it turned right. Daddy tried to speed up and the pickup passed us as though we were standing still. When it zoomed by us, we saw the Confederate flag in its cab window and a rack full of guns behind the front seat.

  The truck slowed to a crawl. Daddy put the pedal to the floor and passed it. It lazed up behind us and rode on our tail. Daddy said, “Kids, if anything happens, stay cool, stay calm.” Was he thinking as we were, rape, lynching, bodies thrown in a swamp, Emmett Till and Viola Liuzzo…?

  We went on through the darkness, rabbits being toyed with by hunting dogs, woods black on either side of us, no other cars, just a wheezing white van and a growling pickup with a rack of guns. Daddy warned us not to turn and look at the guys in the truck; he didn’t want the whites of our eyes flashing our fear to them. With our heads held rigidly front, our ears were like radar screens to pick up the instant when the truck swooped around us to cut us off, the instant when the short, violent third act of our lives would begin. The script was a racial memory in us. We did not know our lines but, oh, we were familiar with the plot.

  Daddy strained over the wheel as though if he willed it hard enough, he could make the van go faster. In the glare of the truck’s headlights, I could see beads of sweat standing up on his arms like condensation on a glass of ice water.

  Mommy whispered, “There’s lights ahead.”

  “Streetlights?”

  “Brighter than that.”

  “Please, God, please.”

  Suddenly there it was; a truck stop. Daddy waited until the last minute to turn in. The pickup truck hesitated, then went on down the road. We pulled in between two eighteen-wheelers. First we were silent, then we started to laugh and cry with nervous relief.

  “We’re stayin’ right here till the morning and it’s light,” Daddy decreed. “We’ll be late for the gig. We’ll have to charge ‘em less, but that’s all right. I like money, but not that much.”

  When we arrived back home after that weekend, he ordered a new car from Detroit, a Chevrolet station wagon to be cut in half and stretched to the length of a limousine.

  7

  The Band’s Wagon

  THE NEXT MORNING, awakened by the dawn from a night of fitful sleep, we were on the road early. But even the reassuring daylight did not quite free us from the fright of the previous night. Daddy must have been carrying a picture of the gun rack slung across the pickup’s back window in his mind, for he suddenly began talking about his days in a construction battalion in the Navy in World War II, describing to us how blacks were not given guns until they were out of the United States.

  “We went through all that marchin’ and drillin’ and all like that, but we never got a real gun. A lot of guys was comin’ into Great Lakes from the South when I was comin’ in from New York. A lot of ‘em didn’t have no shoes on. Big feet, toes as big as your fist. I thought I was uneducated but those guys couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t hardly talk. Some of them had never seen lights before. I don’t know where the Navy got them. They must have wrapped them up and threw them on trucks and brought them on in. They wasn’t gonna give these guys guns. We was drillin’ with dummy guns, with broomsticks.

  “When we got overseas, they had these big old wooden crates with rifles in them. All the black guys lined up and they started handing us these guns with thick grease on them. I said to myself, ‘Here we are within shoutin’ distance of the enemy, and this is the first time I get a rifle. I don’t even know where the bullet comes out at. Three-quarters of these guys are gonna get killed ‘cause they don’t know what to do. This ain’t right. I and the rest should at least be taught how to shoot the thing.’

  “If we’d had guns, though, down at Jackson Barracks in Louisiana before we went overseas, some people would’ve got killed. Townies down there sneaked into the mess hall for the blacks and poisoned the food. A few of the men died. They had to get us out of there in a hurry ‘cause some of the guys, if they coulda got hold of a gun, there was folks that was gonna get their heads shot off.”

  It was the first time Daddy had ever told us any of this, about how he had been too frightened in Louisiana to leave the camp to go into town, about fights in which black sailors had had their eyes gouged out, about being sent overseas and finding they weren’t allowed to fight—they could only man the kitchens behind the lines and drive the trucks carrying ammunition to the white guys in the front lines. “But, hey, they were dyin’ and we were livin’,” Daddy said, “so we wasn’t gonna argue about that.”

  Clearly, fighting, shooting, killing were on Daddy’s mind that morning, and I imagine he was trying to think what he could have done if that pickup truck had forced us off the road the night before. Very little, but they would have had to kill him before they harmed his girls.

  He spent a huge sum of money for those days buying the limousine, but we all felt safe
r because of its speed. Fully loaded, the new car weighed three and a half tons and the tires blew out just as regularly as they had on the old van, so Daddy had the wheels in the back replaced with split rims and truck tires. The car was so heavy that in the winter he would swing out and go ahead of snowplows opening the roads. Daddy drove with every bit of care and caution he could muster, but we always went steadily on. If, on the way home, Mommy suggested it might be better to stop somewhere and wait out the storm, Daddy replied, “We can’t let the music make us lose nothin’ on education. We can’t lose no time or the purpose will be lost. The kids have to get to school, and I have to get back to work or I’ll lose a day’s pay. We’ll make it.”

  Jeanette said that one of her boyfriends had offered to help with the driving. “He’d drive and set up and you wouldn’t have to go with us all the time, Daddy.”

  “Sometimes,” Daddy said slowly, “I don’t believe what I’m hearin’. Here I’m bustin’ my back and you’re tellin’ me your boyfriend can take over and drive the rest of my children. A little bit of money’s comin’ in and everybody wants to take over. Your boyfriend should’ve took over when you all were five years old and paid for the lessons and the instruments. What’re you tryin’ to do—cut my legs off?”

  “It was just a suggestion, Daddy,” she said soothingly. “You needn’t get so upset.”

  When we stayed longer than just the four-hour stint at a college, we often strolled around the campus and sampled the ease of being in an academic setting where people used proper grammar and dressed in tweed jackets and carried books under their arms. Mommy reminded us that what we saw at the dances was only a small part of being a college student. “A skewed aspect,” she called it. “The partying is only a little bit of it. Monday morning comes for them just like it comes for you.”