The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  In the blinding storm, a man climbed from his car and made his way from car to car, saying, “If we don’t help each other, none of us will get up the ramp.” It was clear that he was right. One by one we ventured from the shelter of our cars and gathered behind the first car in line. With the driver steering, we pushed the car up the ramp. Then the next car was pushed. And the next. And the next, until we were all at the top of the ramp. It felt like wartime, with people making common cause to survive.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, I slewed over the bridge and onto Route 80. This superhighway is a major route to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the West and is ordinarily solid with fast-moving cars and trucks. Now, nothing was moving. All was silent and still. I had entered a ghost world. Abandoned cars and trucks were strewn like dead carcasses in every lane. It was a constant fight to maneuver around them in the storm and, with all markers obliterated, to keep from driving off the highway altogether. Inch by inch, I fought my way along, crying now as I faced the prospect that, alone in the night, marooned in the drifts, I might very well freeze to death so close to home.

  The Teaneck exit is the first exit off Route 80. It was ten o’clock when I made it there, and I was down to less than a quarter tank of gas. Now it was an uphill climb to the intersection of my street, but if I could get that far, if I could make a left-hand turn there, I would be just a few blocks from home. I started up the hill. It was a graveyard of abandoned cars blocked from going farther by a jackknifed tractor-trailer at the intersection. The car groaned and spun and slipped as I wormed and squirmed my way through this obstacle course—back, forward; back, forward—struggling for every bit of traction I could get. Hours later I made it to the intersection and somehow crept around the tractor-trailer, whether on the road or sidewalk or someone’s front lawn, I had no idea.

  Now the gas tank was on empty and I still had half a mile to go. I spun sideways. I slipped backward. The rear of the car sashayed like a fan dancer. My eyes blurred from the intensity of my stare through the iced windshield at the featureless wastes of snow; my hands were numb from the intensity of my grip on the steering wheel.

  At last I saw the house, ablaze with light as though Shearwood was trying to provide a beacon for me in the storm. I crawled on, the wheels spinning uselessly around and around but now and again gaining a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. I was almost there when the car coughed, spluttered, died——out of gas. It was two o’clock in the morning—twelve hours after I had started out to drive the eleven miles home.

  I struggled to push the car door open against the weight of snow. I pushed, pushed harder, battered the door against the snowbank. I squeezed my arm out, my shoulder, my head, and twisted and shimmied and struggled until I was out of the car and clawing my way up the bank. I stumbled, fell, got up, fell, crawled, fell against the front door of the house. It opened and Shearwood snatched me up into his arms, hugging and cradling and crooning to me as though I had returned from the dead. And I clung to him and sobbed as though I had.

  My exhausted sleep ended the next day only when Shearwood stood by the bed with a breakfast tray. The eggs were underdone, the toast was overdone—Shearwood is no cook—but what he was communicating was clear: I love you with all of my heart and I was dreadfully afraid I had lost you. He sat by the bed while I ate, never taking his eyes off me and now and again reaching out to pat the blanket over my legs as though to make certain I was solidly there.

  I was giving some thought to suggesting another way of proving I was really there when the telephone rang. It was Uncle Milford calling from Long Branch.

  “Yvonne, your father’s in the hospital.”

  “What! Why?”

  “I’m afraid he’s had a stroke.”

  “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Is he conscious?”

  “No.”

  “What was he doing—shoveling snow?”

  “He came over to our house this morning to see how we were doing after the storm, and he was walking down the driveway when he said he had a headache and slumped to the ground. He’s been unconscious ever since.”

  The day was brilliantly sunny. The storm had passed and crews were working to plow and sand the highways, which were still buried under snow and down to two lanes, but passable. Shearwood shoveled the driveway to get his car out while I dressed. Our housekeeper had been wiser than I and had not tried to get home in the storm, so she was there to look after the children. It was a long, slow, cautious drive to Long Branch, but this time Shearwood was at the wheel.

  At the hospital the neurologist who had been called in said that Daddy’s vital signs were stable, he did not require life support measures, but that he was unresponsive. We went in to see him and I was struck by how peaceful he looked. And, even lying in bed, how sturdy and strong. A nurse who came in the room to turn him said it was as though he were made of concrete, so deceptively heavy was he.

  He continued in a coma through the day and night. By the following day it was clear he was going downhill. We watched and waited in a fog of unreality. Surely he would open his eyes. Surely his laugh would ring out and that rough, affectionate, matter-of-fact voice would come again. It could not be the end, not for this vital, undefeated man. His daughters waited and prayed as his strong heart beat on—the daughters he’d loved so much, the daughters he had given life to and who had been his life.

  But the next day was the end. With a little smile on his face as though he were going to meet his dear, dear Tass, Daddy died on February 15, 1983, a month short of his fifty-eighth birthday.

  All of us—Donna, Linda, Rita, Betty and I—were at his bed-side, all of us except Jeanette.

  Jeanette was in Nigeria. She had gotten her M.D., and during her first year of internship, she had met Emile Powe, a Fellow taking postgraduate training in gastroenterology. She brought him home to meet Daddy, and Daddy said, as he had about Shearwood, “That’s a good man,” and Jeanette had married him.

  By coincidence, I had known Em long before Jeanette met him when I was a resident at Roosevelt and moonlighting one day a week at an adolescent clinic in the Chelsea section of New York. He was a lot like Shearwood: quiet, steady, thoughtful—qualities that Daddy picked up on and approved of, particularly since it was obvious that Em adored Jeanette and thus fulfilled the requirement of loving his woman so much that he would stick by her through thick and thin.

  He and Jeanette were in Africa because, by the terms of a grant Em had received, he was obliged to put in a year in public health service and had elected to serve in Nigeria. They were on the verge of starting for home when cabled word of Daddy’s death reached them. Jeanette cabled back that she would come as quickly as possible, but since we did not know when that would be, we went ahead with plans for the funeral.

  While Daddy had ultimately given his consent to Mommy’s autopsy, we knew how abhorrent the idea was to him. Thus, there was no autopsy, and, also on the basis of his strong wishes expressed at the time of Mommy’s death, the casket was closed because, “If they didn’t come around to see me when I was alive, I don’t want ‘em gawking at me when I’m dead. Let ‘em wonder: Is he really dead or is he still hangin’ ‘round some place?”

  This time the undertaker did not suggest that we hire pallbearers but simply assumed that Donald’s six daughters would carry him to his grave as we had carried our mother. Could we manage it? We were older. The snow on the ground was deeper. Daddy was heavier. The climb to the grave site was still as steep, and we had not been wrestling amplifiers in and out of college buildings in recent years. We resolved our doubts the same way we had before, by telling each other, “Women can do anything they put their minds to.”

  Gathered in the living room of the house that Daddy built and we grew up in, we talked about what we wanted to say at his service. I commented that, even though the last line was not appropriate, the poem, ‘‘If—’’ by Kipling had always reminded me of Daddy. I was thinking of lines like these: “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt yo
u …” and “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew/ To serve your turn long after they are gone, / And to hold on when there is nothing in you/ Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’” and “lf you can fill the unforgiving minute! With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…”

  “It sounds as though it was written about Daddy,” Linda said when I quoted the poem. “Except that it ends: ‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it! And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.’”

  “That’s okay,” Rita said. “He was a man, and we can start the eulogy by saying, ‘But our father never had a son; he had all daughters, and he said to himself, Well, daughters is what I’ve been given, so let me just see what I can do with them.’”

  That struck us as a good idea, and starting from there, using phrases contributed by all of us, we fashioned a tribute to Daddy. Never was one more deeply felt. We described how he was born into poverty, one of ten children, and grew up poor, uneducated, and black; how he met and married our mother and together they formulated a dream that their children would be educated; how he started as a ditchdigger at Fort Monmouth and worked two and three jobs simultaneously to keep us fed and buy us music lessons; how he had served as road manager of the band and driven us thousands of miles. We recounted how many a person remarked to him, “Donald, you work so hard, you’ll kill yourself,” and his reply that he would rather kill himself trying than have his children experience the hunger, poverty, and prejudice he had known. We described how he had given all he had of his time, his energy, and his heart so that we, his children, could rise to stand on equal terms with anyone, man or woman, rich or poor, white or black.

  We spoke most of all of his single-minded devotion to his family. “If loving my family is wrong,” he often said, “then I don’t want to be right.” He was right. And good and honorable and strong and clearheaded, with a wisdom all his own and a great store of common sense that he used in the service of, first, setting a seemingly impossible goal for his daughters and then coaxing, coaching, and guiding us in the struggle to achieve it, relentless in his quest to have us go beyond the limits set by others for his daughters. We ended our tribute by saying that with deep love for him and profound gratitude for his being the person he was, we now laid him to rest beside our mother, a rest he had truly earned and richly deserved.

  Jeanette walked in the door just as we were putting our coats on to leave for the funeral service. Startled, she said, ‘‘You were going ahead without me?” She was not remembering, as we were, that there had been many a time that we’d had to go ahead without her. She went alone to the funeral parlor to say goodbye to Daddy; she, the daughter most like him, who had been both his pride and his grief. Like Daddy, she had done it “My Way,” the song he had told us he wanted sung at his service.

  The rest of us joined her and the service began. I read the poem, Donna shared the reading of the eulogy with Jeanette, then Linda, her voice as big and true as ever, started “My Way,” and one by one we each came in, the Thornton Sisters singing together again, for the last time.

  At the cemetery we gathered at the rear of the hearse, stacked our hands without touching, silently concentrated, broke away, and lifted the flag-draped coffin.

  As determined in death as in life not to let our father down, the ditchdigger’s daughters delivered him without a stumble to his grave beside his beloved wife.

  Curiously, despite the absolute centrality of Daddy to our lives, we did not experience the grief we had felt at Mommy’s death, perhaps because we had such a strong sense of completion. Daddy had done what he set out to do in his life, and after we were grown and did not need him anymore, he had lost his reason for living. He had not been able to find another challenge to absorb his energies, and he sorely missed Mommy. Now he had joined her, and we could not help but feel that he was happier.

  Back at the house, we made coffee and gathered around the table where Mommy and Daddy had sat every morning of our young lives, the command post, in effect, from which they had directed our lives while teaching us about the world and prodding us to excel in it. I looked around the table. We were six women. Six black women. No more or less intelligent, no more or less gifted, than any other black women. As little girls, there had been nothing special about us, nothing to set us apart from the other black children in Long Branch, New Jersey. By any ordinary expectation, we should have grown up to graduate from high school and get factory or clerking jobs, that is, if we had been lucky enough to avoid getting pregnant and becoming high school dropouts, perhaps single mothers living on welfare and having an illegitimate child every other year or so.

  Instead, here we were: Betty, a nurse, and Donna, a court stenographer, each in a stable marriage to a man with a civil service job, each with one child and no intention of having more; Linda, a dentist, an army major married to a lawyer; Rita, the head of the science department in a private school; Jeanette and I, both doctors and married to doctors, me with two children, Jeanette childless by choice. Women of accomplishment, independent women, women capable of taking care of themselves,

  “How did he do it?” I mused aloud, “How did Daddy turn out six women like us? He had no education to speak of; nobody to learn from. He never read a book or a newspaper. Where did he learn to be such an extraordinary father to us?”

  “I’ve often wondered about that,” Betty said. She knew the family he came from, his mother and father, his sisters and brothers, knew them better than any of us because she had been a foster child in that family from the time she was a baby until Nanna died and she had come to live with us, “Donald was different from the rest of his family. He wasn’t like any of them.”

  “But why?” I persisted, “Where did he get his ideas?”

  “Roger asked Daddy that once,” Linda said, referring to her husband.

  “What did Daddy say?”

  ‘‘All he said was, ‘I just did what I thought was right to do. I never thought I was worth a dime unless I could be some help to my kids.’”

  “Unless,” Jeanette amended, with a trace of the old bitterness, “he could run his kids’ lives.”

  I bit my tongue not to remind Jeanette that she would have been a doctor years sooner and with a lot less anguish for all of us if she had listened to Daddy; it was not a time to open old wounds. “He wanted to run our lives,” I agreed, “It was the best thing about him, but finally it was his Achilles’ heel.”

  I was remembering what he had said when he was interviewed for a story about the family for Ebony magazine: “I didn’t want to let them go. I didn’t want them to grow up. When they were all babies, they depended on me. I loved that. I used to love to see them smile when I gave them something.”

  “It’s understandable when you think about it,” Donna said. “Where else but in his own family can a man who is a ditchdigger feel important, feel like a big man?”

  Rita, who had seen the most of Daddy after Mommy died, said, “He told me he wished that when any of you came to see him, you’d come by yourselves.”

  “Without our husbands?”

  “So it would just be family again, so he’d have his girls back.”

  “Without any men around. He never did want other men coming around.”

  “In a way he was right. If he hadn’t been so strict, we’d be living in the projects over at Garfield Court with a raft of kids.”

  “Instead, we’re out in the world living the gospel according to Donald.”

  The gospel according to Donald. It was true. I sometimes said to Shearwood that I doubted whether I had ever had an original thought in my life, I might phrase something differently, use longer words, but I could trace my beliefs, the words I lived by, the guideposts I steered by, to ideas I had heard Daddy express.

  We began to reminisce about the gospel according to Daddy, starting with: “You’re black and you’re ugly and you’re girls, and the world’s already written you off. You can grow up and be a bag lady. You can be on
the streets and the world won’t give a damn whether you live or die. But if you listen to me, we can get out of this.”

  And after that: “If you’re a musician, they can break your fingers. If you’re an athlete, they can break your kneecaps. But…”

  Here he always paused dramatically. “But if you are educated, the only way they can get to you is to kill you. There is no way they can take anything out of your brain. Once you’ve got something in your head, it’s yours as long as you live.”

  What we should have in our heads, in the gospel according to Donald, was something the world needed because then it would not be important that we were black. “A man can be a Ku Klux Klan member who hates blacks, hates niggers, won’t shake hands with ‘em, but if he’s layin’ in the road hurt and bleedin’ and you tell him you’re a doctor, he’s gonna beg you to help him. It don’t make any difference to him then what color you are because he needs you,”

  Jeanette said thoughtfully, “Sometimes I wonder if we weren’t real lucky to be born black. If we’d been high yella, if we’d had skin the color of Lena Horne’s…”

  “Forget it!” we chorused, and Donna quoted more of the gospel according to Donald: “If you’re high yella, you can get over on your looks. Or if you’re rich. Or if you’re male. But if you’re a dark-skinned woman…”

  “Forget it!” we chorused again. I picked up the refrain. “You can have babies and be written off. If you think you can get any place above that by being cutesy, just forget it.” We could all quote Daddy word for word, and the older we got and the more we observed how the world works, the more right we knew him to be, not only about the prejudice among whites against dark-skinned people but among our own race. With equal degrees of talent, as a dancer, say, it would be the lighter-skinned person who’d be chosen to perform, even when the person doing the hiring was a black. Daddy had worked to make sure we did not have to live our lives subject to that kind of judgment.