“But why you does call yourself Sam and not Samuel? And what’s your middle name?” Adriana might have asked when she was less shy with him.
And Sam Burke might have said with a dismissive wave of his hand, “Middle name! I forget that long since! Bajans believe in having too many long, old-time English names. I decide to modernize mine. Sam Burke is all the name I need.”
“Wait, you sure you ain’ from Bridgetown?” Teasing him.
He laughed, pleased. “People did say that about me from when I was small, y’know. ‘That boy! He gets on like somebody raise up in big Bridgetown-self.’”
Acting the part of a town blade, Sam Burke might have then abruptly changed the conversation. “But you know, you got some sweet, sweet flesh on you’ bones.” His mouth to her ear. His hand reaching for the sweetness.
“Wait, where you goin’? You’s too forward!”
“You must tell me to stop then.”
Adriana probably gave a loud suck-teeth to register her disapproval, but might not have said a word.
There remains a standard studio photograph of Adriana and Sam Burke taken shortly after the birth of their first child. Adriana, seated with the baby on her lap, is wearing a cream-colored flapper dress, a long strand of fake pearls and the de rigueur headband around her neatly combed-out hair. Dangling from her arm is an extravagantly large English garden-party hat—in all likelihood a prop supplied by the photo studio to enhance her outfit. The baby on her lap is a pretty little girl-child (my older sister), a love child, conceived some months before the marriage vows. (A fact that would come to light only after Adriana’s death.) She’s holding the baby’s tiny hands in her own, and with quiet pride offers the camera not only the sight of her perfect child but herself as well, someone who has been rescued from cleaning a ten-room house on Long Island and is now a wife, a mother and a Madam in her own right. And with her own home, if you please! True, it’s only a cold-water flat in Red Hook, Brooklyn, up with the Eye-talians who can scarce speak a word of English. True, the bathtub is right in the middle of the kitchen. But never mind. Like all Bajans she and her new husband are looking to do better, determined to progress.
Beside her in the photograph stands Sam Burke, his thick bush of hair parted boldly down the middle above his sharply planed, long-jawed, handsome face. He, too, is dressed for the occasion, in a three-piece suit that, although cheap, looks expensive on him, even custom made. A boulevardier’s bow tie complements the bespoke-looking suit, as does the handkerchief and fountain pen in his breast pocket. One hand is thrust into his trouser pocket. His other hand holds a cane (probably also a studio prop) angled just so at his side.
Adriana and Sam Burke (and their firstborn),
Brooklyn, 1925
Sam Burke presents himself as someone who has never been near a canefield, or, for that matter, inside a damn mattress factory where he has to wear a snood like a woman to protect his hair from the lint flying about the place. The ignominy of that snood! No, Sam Burke has never been near a field or a factory in his life! The haughty gaze he directs at the camera dares it to reveal otherwise.
That was his way. My father went about life insisting, by his manner, that his was a higher calling than the series of factory jobs he held over the years. In his eyes he possessed the ability and talent to be so much more. . . .
The course he took in radio repair—which he never finished—almost ruined our priceless secondhand console radio in the living room. Once he abruptly discontinued a home-study course he was taking in accounting. Too damn long, too many figures, too expensive. The trumpet lessons that went on every Saturday and Sunday morning for months kept us with our hands clapped over our ears until the trumpet, too, was abandoned.
Also, on and off for years, he was a salesman after work and on weekends. Sample case in hand, cheap suit fitting him just so, he made the rounds of black Brooklyn selling a variety of products not to be found in the white department stores downtown. One time it was hair grease and hot combs; then a line of cosmetics compatible with the dark skin of his customers; later on, ladies’ hose in a monochrome of brown. These and other selling ventures Sam Burke pursued until they either failed to turn a profit or he simply grew tired of repeating the sales pitch: “Each time you singing the same damn tune just to sell a pair of stockings. Finish with that!” Or—and this was more often the case—he had again decided that selling door-to-door was beneath his talents.
Although the holy grail of his true calling continued to elude him, Sam Burke remained surprisingly optimistic. A vocation that truly suited him? A job that didn’t call for the overalls and work clothes of a common laborer? It was only a matter of time. So that, especially with me and my sister, he remained his playful, irresistible “Bridgetown” self.
“Ladyfolks, ladyfolks, rise and shine and give God the glory!” was the way he roused us each morning. While in Cuba he had fallen in love with all things Spanish and had named us accordingly: Anita for my sister; Valenza, after Valencia, for me—although I was called by my middle name, Pauline. (A name I promptly changed to Paule with a silent “e” the moment I reached my majority at age thirteen.) Among the few Spanish words and phrases our father had retained was “Quieta la boca”—so that he loved it when our noisy sibling rivalry gave him an excuse to cry out, “Señoritas, señoritas, quieta la boca, por favor!”
He sang. Whenever Adriana complained about his frequent job changes and the abandoned mail-order courses and selling ventures, Sam Burke would drown her out with song. It was always the same song, a hymn he might have learned as a boy in the little poor-behind village forgotten behind God’s back that he refused to name, a hymn like a Gregorian chant being sung in the high stone nave of a cathedral. “Satan go ’way / Satan go ’way / Satan go ’way / And let Jesus come in,” he would intone repeatedly to silence the Beelzebub of her voice.
It usually worked. Adriana would eventually throw up her arms in loving despair and cease complaining.
My own personal and fondest memory of Sam Burke and his antic ways has to do with a soft-boiled egg. A child who was slow to talk, I had been left in his care one morning, with instructions that I was to be fed my usual soft-boiled egg for breakfast. Initially, he went about preparing the egg the proper way: briefly boiling it, then emptying the white and yolk into the eggcup; next, a pinch of salt, a smidgen of butter. But then, instead of using a spoon to stir the mixture, Sam Burke reached for one of the extra long wooden matches used to light the coal stove that was our source for both cooking and heat. Smiling, holding the match by its flammable head, he waved the long stick like a magician’s wand before abruptly using it to stir my egg. I shook my head no and kept on shaking it even as he continued stirring with the matchstick, until magically, the egg became a frothy albuminous yellow. Which was exactly the way I liked it. Only then did he pick up the spoon to feed me.
To this day it remains the best soft-boiled egg I’ve ever eaten.
As an illegal, Sam Burke lived in constant fear of the INS: Any day, undocumented alien that he was, he could be found out, arrested, jailed and deported. He was nonetheless fiercely patriotic and, during the war—World War II—he must have wanted to express his loyalty in some public, tangible way. Because one Saturday morning, Sam Burke marched his two girl-children, his ladyfolks, his señoritas, to downtown Brooklyn, and blowing his entire week’s pay, bought us both U.S. Air Force bomber jackets.
How he must have wanted a boy-child! True, Sam Burke loved me no less for being a girl. Yet my birth, coming four long years after my sister’s, must have been something of a disappointment for him, if only briefly.
It was a grievous and permanent disappointment for Adriana. This I knew before I even fought my way out of her womb. Because hadn’t I, during my nine months there, heard her praying nonstop for a boy-child, Adriana believing that a little Sam Burke, Jr., would miraculously transform his father into a provider on the order of her brother, Winston Carlyle, and the other Bajan men who w
ere all steadily progressing in spite of “the discrimination n’ thing in this man country.” Adriana had pinned her hopes on a birth she was certain would produce the needed sea change in her husband.
Imagine then her disappointment at yet another girl-child; and one, at that, who was nothing as pretty as her first. From early on, Adriana would recite almost daily the list of my physical flaws: my large, bright-pink lower lip (“like a piece o’ raw meat”); my two ugly, oversized big toes; “the two horse teeth” that replaced my milk teeth up front. As for my gloomy, long-jawed face? It was the face, according to Adriana, “of a child that’s living its old days first!”
There were my personality flaws as well:
“Hard-ears!”
“Willful!”
“Own-ways!”
And I did, indeed, pretty much go my own way almost from the beginning. So that in the formal studio photograph that is taken of every Bajan child by age five—even of those children like myself who are disappointments—my picture revealed an unsmiling, rather severe-looking four-year-old whose hands were firmly clasped on top of the children’s picture book she’d been given as a prop.
Willful, own-ways, I had also already chosen my life’s work.
Although I wasn’t the hoped-for miracle worker, we did manage to graduate from the cold-water flats in Red Hook and on Fulton Street where I was actually born. We then lived in a series of walkups that at least had steam heat, hot water, a gas stove, and the bathtub where it naturally belonged. Later, when the white flight began in force from the uptown, upscale, tree-lined neighborhoods of Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights in central Brooklyn, where a few Bajans, including Adriana’s always-progressing brother, had already succeeded in purchasing a number of the prized brownstone houses, we, too, the Burke family, also managed to make the move to “the heights.” Our circumstances hadn’t really improved, yet with Adriana supplementing Sam Burke’s weekly salary by doing day’s work—the Madams again—we were able to lease an old Victorian brownstone on Hancock Street uptown.
No. 501 Hancock was a plain Jane of a brownstone with almost no decorative stonework on its somber reddish-brown four-story façade. It was graced, however, by a handsome chestnut tree out front, a pear tree in the backyard, a sun parlor on the second floor that overlooked the pear tree, and two upper-floor apartments that could be rented out to pay the greater part of the lease.
Best of all for me, 501 Hancock was only a short distance from a local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. A necessary home away from home. It was there, come age twelve, that I summoned up the courage one day to ask the white librarian for a list of books by colored writers.
“Books! Books! Her middle name is books!” is the way Adriana greeted me each time I returned from the library with an armload. “Her head always buried in a book!”
For his part, Sam Burke claimed as his domain at 501 the sun parlor with its sheer wall of windows flooded with light. He spent his weekends there, recovering from the factory job of the moment, while dreaming up other pursuits that might free him from such jobs.
As for Adriana, her realm was the large kitchen on the ground floor where she entertained her friends, part-time day-workers like herself and all of them women from home. Bajans seldom socialized with the other islanders who had also immigrated to Brooklyn. Trinidadians were considered too frivolous, a people who lived only for their yearly carnival. Jamaicans in their view were a rough lot who disgraced the King’s English by dropping their “h’s” (’im dis and ’im dat). Those from the lesser-known islands such as St. Vincent, Grenada, St. Lucia and the like were dismissed as “low-islanders,” meaning small, insignificant. As for American black people, they needed to stand up more to the white man. Bajans, meanwhile, had no objection to being called “the Jews of the West Indies” by the other islanders—the term based on their perceived ability “to squeeze a penny till it cried ‘Murder! Murder!’” and “to turn a dime into a dollar overnight.” There was their known entrepreneurial chutzpah in general: “As soon as a Bajan gets ten cents above a beggar he opens a business.”
The tight, insular little world of Bajan Brooklyn took pride in the stereotypes attributed to it.
Whenever Adriana and her friends gathered in the kitchen to “ol’ talk,” as they put it, my sister and I, as girl-children, were required to be on hand, seen but not heard. Those times were the happiest I ever saw Adriana. In their highly inventive Bajan English, she and her “soully-gal” friends from home talked about everything under the sun and had an opinion about everything. What I loved most were the sayings and Bajan proverbs that embellished their endless talk. Most I didn’t understand fully, but loved anyway.
“I tell yuh, I has read hell by heart and called every generation blessed!” This when overwhelmed by trouble of one kind or another.
“The sea ain’ got no back door!” Caution. The importance of exercising caution in this life. “If you’s caught in a house that’s on fire there’s a chance maybe to escape through the back door. Not so the sea. No back doors.”
“Beautiful-ugly.” Their favorite adjective for nearly everything, including even the brownstones they were desperately struggling to buy or simply to lease. “The beautiful-ugly old house. Is nothing but trouble.” Everything for them contained its opposite.
“Cut-and-contrive.” “I tell yuh, in this life you got to know how to cut-and-contrive.” Improvisation. One had to know how to improvise to survive.
The mothers were skillful raconteurs as well. A few among them, including Adriana, were acknowledged to be superlative talkers and master storytellers. Those few were crowned “mout’-kings,” kings of “talking the talk,” as it were.
“Soully-gal, you’s a real-real mout’-king!” was said of them.
There was no greater compliment.
I couldn’t have known it at the time, but I had my first lessons in the art and craft of writing while being forced to listen to Adriana and her friends in the kitchen at 501 Hancock. Decades later, I would christen them the “Mother Poets” and pay grateful homage to them in an article called “The Poets in the Kitchen,” which was published as part of a series on the “Making of a Writer” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
“Every Bajan buying and we still leasing! Shame! I feel so shame I don’ even like going ’round my friends or family anymore, especially that brother of mine, what with that wife of his always showing off all the nice-nice things they have just so’s to make me feel bad. I can’t stand the sight of that woman!
“Shame! That I went and put myself with somebody you’d never think was a Bajan. No real get-up-and-go to him a-tall. Always trying out one foolish scheme after another that don’ turn so much as a penny! Shame!”
Adriana’s Xanthippe voice in 501’s austere, high-ceilinged rooms. Over the years the sweet-faced young mother in the family photograph had become a West Indian version of Socrates’ shrewish wife.
Also, by then, Sam Burke had long abandoned trying to silence her with his playful “Satan go ’way” hymn. Now, pitting his voice against hers, he equally assailed her for having squandered the Panama Money years ago on the visit home. Money that could have been a down payment on the “beautiful-ugly” house—said with the utmost sarcasm—that she so craved. Finally, he ceased responding in kind. Rather, when the Xanthippe voice became unbearable, Sam Burke simply put on one of his cheap, bespoke-looking suits and took to the streets. Or, according to Adriana, “took to his latest ‘keep-miss,’” some woman who, like herself long ago, could not resist the bold part down the middle of his hair, his “Bridgetown ways,” his abbreviated, modernized name, and his charm.
At last, a boy-child. Nine years after my disappointing birth, the long-hoped-for son finally, his name Franklin Edsel, after FDR and the car maker Henry Ford’s only child. Fate being what it is, however, the boy-child arrived too late to bring about any miracles, because by then Sam Burke, in his endless seeking, had found god. God in the person of a short
, brown, bald and rotund fellow named George Baker from Georgia, who, having migrated north, had somehow metamorphosed into a god called Father Divine, with his heavenly kingdom an old, outsized brownstone mansion in Harlem. Moreover, this Father Divine declared himself to be the one and only father to his followers, the Sole Progenitor, the Divine Paterfamilias. Consequently, all his followers were his children. So that no matter what had once been their familial roles, they were now, in effect, brothers or sisters to their so-called spouses, and to their so-called children as well.
Thus Sam Burke, our father, became Brother Burke. His worshipful daughters, his long-awaited son, his wife, all were to think of him as their brother and to address him as such: Brother Burke. The short little self-proclaimed god from Georgia had relieved him of the onus of being both husband and father.
“Thank you, Father Divine. Peace, it’s truly wonderful. Father will provide.”
This became Sam Burke’s principal mantra, intoned almost nonstop. His gaze also assumed the otherworldly cast of an adept, while an almost visible aura seemed to have formed around him, rendering him immune to the abuse Adriana heaped equally on him and on his “little dough-off [meaning ‘short’], bald-head, so-called god.”
Adriana verbally assaulted them both without letup to the day that her husband (now “brother”) quit his latest factory job and proudly announced that Father Divine had chosen him to help administer a branch of the kingdom being established in Philadelphia.
His so-called god had delivered him at last from the long futile search for a vocation worthy of his still undefined talents.
“Thank you, Father. Peace, it’s truly wonderful. Father will provide.”
With that, Brother Burke, a.k.a. Sam Burke, vanished from our lives, leaving behind among his discarded family a devastated eleven-year-old.
With him gone, whatever small gains we had made were quickly lost, beginning with 501 Hancock. Even with the rent from the two upper floors, Adriana simply could not manage the lease. Nor would she ask her brother for help, having broken off all contact with him due to his wife, whom she despised, the woman forever boasting of her nice-nice things. There were other family members in England and Canada, but they were of no help. So that in short order we returned to the series of walkups, even cheaper ones this time. Even so, we often found ourselves about to be evicted for back rent, our belongings piled on the sidewalk. We became nomads wandering from one brief resting place to another in central Brooklyn until we finally ended up in the cramped third-floor apartment of a brownstone owned by a fellow Bajan.
Triangular Road Page 5