by Dorothy West
Mr. Bancroft’s money was not that sanctified. He was always lending it to my father. But my father had collateral, and all my mother had was what my father gave her, which was never enough for her unending spring of needs.
I never saw Mr. Bancroft. To me he was just a name that my father spoke with pride and respect. He was my father’s banker. At least that was the phrase my mother always used, in a voice tinged with sighing because my father’s money disappeared into Mr. Bancroft’s bank, and all she had access to were the leavings.
Mr. Bancroft gave me presents as a gesture of affectionate regard for my father. He was a Boston blueblood, born to everything that my father was not. I suppose he admired my father for never seeming to know that he was born the wrong color to succeed.
My father was a wholesaler in the Boston Market, the only black man who had ever been a wholesaler in that traditionally rich company of old firms and old names. His produce business, its lettering, “Imported and Domestic Fruits and Vegetables, Bananas a Specialty,” was just opposite Faneuil Hall. To Mr. Bancroft that was a stupendous climb for a slave-born man who had only a few snatched hours of the rudiments of learning, and had taught himself to write in a Spencerian hand, to read whatever was set before him, to talk with a totally literate tongue, and most of all, perhaps most importantly of all, to figure like a wizard.
When he rattled off figures to his bookkeeper, he was adding them up in his head faster than she could put them down on paper. He loved figures. I often felt that he would have been a mathematics professor if life had offered him a college education. I am probably wrong. The reason my father was a wholesaler was because he knew he wanted to be a buyer and seller when he was ten years old—just three years out of slavery—and he never veered from his goal.
That was why he married late in middle life. He hadn’t meant to get married at all. In the beginning he was too busy turning himself into a businessman to think about marriage. After he became a solid businessman and had some dollars in his pocket, he was terribly afraid that every woman he met had designs on his money.
Then he met my mother. She was poor as a church mouse, and she hated him on sight. She hated the gold tooth he flaunted in the middle of his mouth to show the world he was rich enough to have his own tooth yanked out and a flashy gold one set in to spotlight his smile. She hated his diamond stickpin because diamonds should only be worn by ladies. She hated his self-assurance. He was old enough to be her father, and he had no right to act as if it didn’t make any difference. Above all, she hated the way he looked at her, as if he had fallen in love at first sight.
My mother was a beauty, and it was always more of a bother to her than a blessing. She walked at six months and talked at nine. She was spirited, fearless, sassy, and smart. Her older brothers made her their mascot and rode her around on their shoulders. From that bold height her gold-colored, pink-cheeked beauty was like a banner.
People with nothing better to do stopped dead in their tracks to talk baby talk to her. They wasted her brothers’ precious playing time by getting in the way of their rush to the secret places where they kept their boyhood joy, a wonderful region of whooping and hollering, from which they had better return by chore time or get a good licking.
My uncles sought revenge on these usurpers of time, and used my all too willing mother as their patsy. They taught her every cuss word that had ever been invented. When well-intentioned souls came toward her, my mother let out a string of curses that could curl a sailor’s hair. She didn’t know what she was saying, but from her brothers’ snickers, from the faces falling apart in front of her, she very well knew she was saying something she shouldn’t.
When these outraged souls broke their necks to tell my grandmother, Mama had a green switch waiting for my mother’s return. My mother got at least one licking a day from the time she was two until she stopped being a tomboy at twelve. She always said that Mama lived on her behind, but she had enough fun to make up for it.
Half of her lickings were for tearing the lace on her drawers. Mama had more children than any house around. When you have that many children noseybodies mind your business, wondering how you can feed so many mouths, how you can clothe so many growing bodies, and where you can find the time to bring them up in the fear of God, which is where my mother’s cussing didn’t help.
The sum of my grandmother’s pride was the lace that decorated her little girls’ drawers in those days when little girls wore long-legged drawers that showed beneath their dresses. The lace that my grandmother made by hand and sewed on all those homemade drawers was her way of showing those noseybodies who minded her business that nobody went in want at her house, not for bread, not for meat, not for lace on their britches.
One of my mother’s worst lickings was the one she got for bringing home cold biscuit and bacon rind that some misguided soul had given her because she was one of all those hungry children Mama had to feed.
Mama could feed her children better than cold biscuit and bacon rind, and she didn’t want my dumbhead mother accepting hog scraps like that was what she ate at home. But how were noseybodies to know any different if my mother, always ready with her fists, always ready to take a dare, was as ragged and dirty as anybody’s orphan as soon as Mama turned her back and she could sneak away?
How often that torn lace hanging from my mother’s dirt-streaked drawers put shame in Mama’s pride. How often Mama had to take a switch to the seat of that shame. She could not know that down the years my mother would tell it over and over, her eyes alight with the wonder of it, how Mama found time out of bits and pieces of her overburdened hours to transform her love into handmade lace.
My mother’s massive atonement was taken out on us. She told us early in our lives that we weren’t going to worry her to death the way she worried Mama to death. Every word that Mama had preached to her she practiced on us. She wore us out with keeping us clean. How often she snatched us up from our tidy play on her spotless floor and changed our unoffending drawers in memory of Mama. She who had been a heathen from dawn to dark made us behave around the clock.
But in keeping with her character, she was often bored by our predictable behavior. She would come into our orderly play area with its coloring books, its blunted scissors, its toy piano, its dollhouse and other pallid playthings, and she would look at us with a kind of disbelief that we were contentedly playing in such pitiful surroundings.
Standing in the doorway, the telltale pink in her cheeks giving her gloating away, she would tell us one of her stories, maybe the one about the time she stole Papa’s big gun and made up a game called “Run, children, run, you massa’s drunk and got a gun.” She was only six and Papa’s hunting gun was bigger than she was. Mama’s children scattered like scared chickens, with my mother running after them, that big old gun bumping along beside her. Everybody was yelling and screaming, half in fun, half in fright.
By accident that gun went off. It knocked my mother off her feet, but in a moment she scrambled up and scooted under the porch. The other children were hiding, too, from the hail of bullets they thought were whizzing at them.
Mama came to the door. For a moment she just stood there, staring at that big smoking gun in the yard, her face pale as ashes. She said an anguished prayer to God. Then she began the roll call of her children, all those names, all those children, each one so dear to her, even my mother, that one child less, though it might have eased her burden, would have broken her heart.
It took a long time to call those names, starting with Bubber at the top and ending at the bottom with the walking baby. She called every name except my mother’s. She was saving that for last.
One by one Mama’s children came out from their hiding places saying, “Yes’m, here’s me,” and turning up for her inspection. Her eyes darted up and down the line, looking for blood. They were all alive, and nobody had a limb shot off.
Then she called my mother in a voice that reached under that porch and scooped my mother out l
ike sand in a shovel. Mama didn’t even bother to ask who else in that lineup had stolen Papa’s gun. She just lit into my poor mother as if all her other children had halos on their heads. My mother so often said that when she was a child she got everybody’s beating. But mostly, I think she got her own.
Sometimes I think how young Mama was when her children started coming. She was sixteen, maybe that’s why she made herself so strict, letting her voice boom like a deep-toned bell, being so almighty handy with that switch. She was trying so hard to act as if she had been grown a long time back. She was trying so hard to act as if she was born to be the boss and not take sass.
She was born a slave, bound to obedience as soon as she was old enough to say, “Yes, mistis, yes, massa,” with a beating waiting in the barn for any show of wishing she had a say of her own.
Then there was a war, and then there was a cessation of war, and for a moment of time, my grandmother was free, jumping up and down on an old stump, the master’s red hair in her bouncing braids, shouting, “I’se free, I’se free,” not quite knowing what it truly meant, but knowing the sound was sweet to hear.
All too soon she was bound again. For at fifteen she was bound in marriage to my nineteen-year-old grandfather, whose beauty my mother’s beauty couldn’t hold a candle to, though a family saying is that my mother tried to look like Papa. Then Mama was bound forever by her batches of babies, her girlhood over before it was ever experienced. Between the time that she walked the wide road away from the circumscribed world of the plantation and the time that child raising engulfed her, she had such a little time to look at the larger world and make wishes.
But she made wishes for her children, some of them as passionate as prayers. She wished for them to be born without blemish. She wished for them to thrive at her breast. She wished for God to bless her table with enough to go around, and perhaps an extra portion for whoever wanted more, so that hunger would not stunt their bodies or slow their minds, and they could live in a harsh white world with the strength and the wit to survive.
In some miraculous way so many of Mama’s wishes came true including her deep-down wish for a Christmas doll for whichever little daughter had turned seven.
This was Mama’s leftover longing from the Christmas of her slave childhood when she hid behind the parlor door, and watched her master’s little daughters playing with their Christmas dolls that looked as real as babies.
Mama had rag dolls, and clothespin dolls, and such, but Mama never had a doll that looked like real. The morning her first girl baby was born Mama made herself a vow that every girl child she gave birth to would have a real true doll to treasure.
For a month before her special Christmas my mother never told a lie, or cussed or tore her drawers, or came home bloody, or did anything bad enough to change the mind of God or Santa Claus or whoever was in charge of giving dolls to colored children. For a month my mother was as nearly perfect as she would never be again.
And then came Christmas morning, and the moment in that morning when my mother saw a real true doll propped beside the fireplace, a real true china doll with real hair and real eyes that opened and shut. With her heart pounding my mother looked shyly at Mama, and Mama said, “See what Santa Claus brought you. She’s holding out her arms to you. Go pick her up and love her.”
All that day my mother loved that doll with a tenderness Mama didn’t know was in her. She was possessed with love for it. The doll looked so real. She looked so alive, maybe she was alive, Santa Claus could do anything.
My mother began to believe it with all her might. She thought she could feel her doll’s heart beat. She thought she could hear her breathe. She thought she could feel her body turn to flesh.
The suspense became unbearable. There came a moment toward dusk of that Christmas day when my mother had to know.
She carried her doll outdoors where she could be by herself. She knew what she had to do. She had to see if her doll had brains. If her doll had brains, it had to be real. Only real people had brains.
In her highly excited state my mother was trembling uncontrollably. As she struck her doll’s head against the step, she only meant to give a light tap to make a little crack just big enough to see if there were any brains inside.
My mother’s aim was all too true, her hand was all too heavy. That doll’s head broke into a hundred pieces. In one split second there was no head at all, just my mother wildly screaming, and Mama coming running and seeing my mother with a headless doll in her hand before the day was over.
The look that passed between them was one of hopelessness. Mama’s heart was breaking because my mother was beyond redemption. My mother’s heart was breaking because her doll was dead, and she had killed it. She got a licking, of course, but she didn’t feel it. She was too numb to feel Mama’s crying hand.
Though none of us walked when we were six months old or talked when we were nine months old, we showed sufficient signs of intelligence to keep her from cracking our heads to see if we had any brains.
On my mother’s side we were a tribal family, happiest under a shared roof. Our house, though big, was never big enough for our permanent or passing kin. The family saying was that if we lived in the Boston Museum, which was the biggest building we knew about, we’d still want one more room.
My mother had more brothers and sisters than she or they could ever count. I remember the arguments that were part of every try. Even before my mother and her sisters really got started—her brothers never bothered—they stopped to squabble.
Somebody would say that Mama had twenty-one children. Someone else would protest indignantly that Mama only had eighteen. Everybody would begin to take sides, with each side feeling it was upholding Mama’s honor, either by defending her right to bear twenty-one babies or by refusing to brand her with this dumfounding distinction.
Finally my mother would command, “Get the chairs, get the chairs.” The sisters would line up the chairs in two facing rows, both rows chafing to start the rundown of Mama’s children, and settle the matter once and for all.
An older sister, as was befitting, would start calling the names of Mama’s babies in the order of their birth: Bubber, Daughter, Robert, Carrie … But at some point along the line a scornful voice would rudely interject that her sister had left out Scipio, Mama’s baby that died between Robert and Carrie.
This second speaker would be challenged by a third, who insisted that Scipio didn’t come along in Mama’s first batch of babies. He didn’t come along until midway in Mama’s second batch. It was Mama’s baby girl Jessie that lived and died between Robert and Carrie. This statement drew the outrage of a fourth contestant, who retorted that Mama never had a baby girl named Jessie. She lost a baby boy named Jessie.
The ball went back and forth. An argument would rise, subside. The name count would begin again, and again an irate voice would take over. Everybody had a turn at starting the count. But nobody ever got to finish it. Even those sisters on the same side would start disputing with each other about the color of a dead baby’s hair. One by one they hollered each other down.
Oh, so many times I wished that somebody would get to finish that count without being hollered down, that somebody would be allowed to get it right. But always the count was cut off until there was nobody left to try.
A wounded silence would engulf the sisters, draining their joy in being together until my mother could think of something funny to bring them back to laughing and loving, like one of her stories about Rena Robinson, who was so fat that once around Rena Robinson was twice around Central Park.
Maybe only Mama could have told the total of her children, letting the lost ones lie on her lips a little longer than the living, remembering their struggling breath against her rejected breast, from which they had no strength to draw sustenance. But that she gave so many children vigorous life in that harsh time and place was the comfort that eased her weariness.
Sending her children to school was my grandmother’
s greatest miracle, an enduring monument to her memory. That she who could neither read nor write, and could so easily have said that such adornments were of poor use to black folks whose hands could learn faster than their heads, that she could aspire to open the doors of their minds was the miracle that made the generations that came after her more than mind creatures.
The incredible part of it was that she paid their way. Free schooling for blacks had not been invented. But beginning to spread across the state was a scattering of private academies, established by gentlewomen from the North, mostly New England spinsters of means and selflessness, whose abolitionist background was their impetus.
The tuition was little more than a token imposed to give pride and purpose and value to those parents and children who were participants. However small the sum, when it had to be multiplied over and over, it added up to a sizable sacrifice.
Papa had his regular job in the factory and in growing season a job in the fields before the factory whistle. All year round he stretched his working day beyond all normal limits, doing odd jobs of any description. He was known for and sought for his great strength and his indifference to danger. He could do alone for one man’s pay what two other men would take longer to do.
My mother lived in backcountry. School was twelve miles going and coming. She skipped and ran and leaped for joy all the way.
Her first day at school the teacher wrote something called the alphabet in bold and beautiful letters on a blackboard. My mother practically learned them in one gulp. She loved the feel of them marching in her mind. It was the most magical day in her life. She couldn’t wait to get home and stand before Mama, and sing the song of revelation from A to Z.
When she learned to spell cat, she was in a fever to learn to spell dog. When she learned to count to ten, there was no stopping her rush to reach twenty. When she knew the exaltation of reading whole sentences, and stood before Mama, reading aloud from her first reader, she held in her hands the lifeline that would link the generations.