“Yes. Sukie’s always picking on me.” I handed Mother the three dollars. “I walked home and saved the nickel. Can I have it?” I didn’t mention that I had also sneaked on the subway and saved that nickel, too.
“I was going to give you a nickel anyhow,” Mother said. “You didn’t have to walk back home.”
“I didn’t do nothing to Sukie, Mother. She’s always picking on me.”
“You been running away from her for two weeks,” Mother said, “but you still had to fight her, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but …”
“And in those two weeks every day you got more scared of her.”
“She’s bigger than me.”
“Francie, you can beat anything, anybody, if you face up to it and if you’re not scared.”
“But, Mother, Daddy said ladies don’t fight with their fists in the street like common tramps. That’s what he said.”
“There are more ways to fight, Francie, than with your fists.”
“I wish somebody would tell Sukie that.”
I spoke first to Sukie the next day and we were best friends again. She had stolen a quarter from her mother’s purse that morning and wanted to know what I had.
“Nothing,” I muttered, ashamed to admit I was too scared to steal my mother’s change. It wasn’t exactly that I was scared. I had taken a dime from Mother’s pocketbook once, and she had spent a half hour on her knees looking for it under the couch and worrying about that lousy dime all day. I could never bring myself to pinch anything from her again.
Sukie bought two caramel lollipops and gave me one. When we were best friends she was very generous, buying me whatever she got for herself. Maybe I could get a nickel from Daddy and tomorrow I would tell her I picked his pocket. That oughta make her happy.
“GET ten cents’ worth of ground meat and ask the butcher for a soup bone.”
“Yes, Mother.”
I had just come home from school, and I ran back downstairs and into the meat store on the corner. It was empty except for Mr. Morristein, the plump butcher whose hair was so nappy it looked colored.
“I want ten cents’ worth of hamburger meat and my mother says to please give her a soup bone.”
“Come to the end of the counter, Francie, and let me see how big you are growing.”
I sighed and scuffed up the sawdust on the floor as I walked to the end of the display case holding the meat. Mr. Morristein, in his scroungy white smock, patted my shoulder and his hand slipped down and squeezed my breast.
“My, my. Such a nice big girl you are getting.”
His voice had gone funny again as if his tongue was too thick for his mouth. I stood there patiently while his hands fumbled over my body. Anytime I came to the butcher and no one else was there I had to stand still for this nonsense.
“Mr. Morristein. My mother is in a hurry.”
His hands were now rubbing my thigh and my dress was halfway up. The bell over the door rang and Mr. Morristein scuttled back around the end of the counter as Mrs. Mackey entered, beaming her happy smile at me.
“How are you, Francie?”
“Fine, Mrs. Mackey.”
“The second figure out yet?”
“No, ma’am. Just the two in the lead.”
“I sure hope it’s two oh two. I dreamed about my dead husband last night and that play’s for his name. Tell your father I want him to play the piano at my whist party next week. He’s all booked up for this weekend, ain’t he?”
“I think so, Mrs. Mackey.”
“Here’s your meat, Francie. And two soup bones I am sending to your mother.”
“Thank you, Mr. Morristein.”
Two soup bones. I hoped Mother would be impressed. I passed the bakery shop and Max the Baker was outside sweeping the tile. I got extra rolls from him, too, whenever he got the chance to feel me. Max the Baker was very sorry looking. Everything about him from his pinpoint head to his narrow feet was tiny, and he was pasty white not dark like the other Jews on the block. His gray tomcat came out of the bakery and rubbed against his leg. I stuck my tongue out at Max the Baker and raced into my hallway.
Sukie hollered after me. “You comin’ back down? Let’s go to the park.”
“I’ll ask my mother.”
I ran upstairs and pushed against our door and the lock sprang open.
“Mr. Morristein gave us two soup bones,” I told Mother. “Can I go to the park with Sukie?”
“Two soup bones. That’s the second time this week he’s given us something extra. What’s got into that old Jew? You can go to the park but I want you back up here before six so you can set the table. You hear?”
“Yes, Mother.”
It was a lovely day, warm, but not too hot. At Mt. Morris Park we climbed to the bell tower and watched the kids below playing in the playground. I liked to swing on the swings, sailing up high over the treetops. If you closed your eyes to slits and peered through the green lace the leaves made, you could imagine you were someplace else. Anyplace you wanted to be. But Sukie didn’t want to go swinging so we came up here where the bums were sprawled on the benches and stretched out on the grass.
Sukie left the path and clambered through the underbrush and I followed her. We came upon a little clearing completely surrounded by shrubbery so that it made a little cave. An old white man was sitting on the ground watching us intently. His chin was gray with stubble and the rest of his face was splotchy and red. His khakis were so dirty they were stiff. We stopped a few feet away from him.
“You girls wanna make a nickel?” He started to rise.
“Stay where you are,” Sukie commanded.
“Aw, come on,” the man pleaded, falling back onto the grass. “I won’t hurt you. I just wanna feel you a little.”
“No feeling,” Sukie said.
“Just a look then,” the man said desperately as Sukie turned away. “Just pull down your pants and let me look.”
“A nickel apiece?” Sukie asked.
“A nickel apiece.”
The man flipped a coin at each of us and we caught it before it hit the ground, being careful to keep our distance. Sukie lifted up her skirt and pulled down her bloomers and I did the same, watching the man’s face all the time. His gray stubble turned purple and his tongue darted in and out between his lips like a puppy lapping up milk.
“Come closer.” He started to crawl toward us. We pulled up our bloomers and, turning, darted through the hedge. Crossing over the path, we kept on running down the hill, laughing and shrieking as we lost our footing and rolled to the bottom. Giggling, we got to our feet and brushed the grass off our clothes.
I was glad Sukie never let any of these bums touch us. It was bad enough having the butcher and Max the Baker always sneaking a feel, but at least they were clean. Then there was the men on the roof showing off their privates and the man in the movies with his fumbling hands—that little bald-headed man who had stopped hanging around my roof and now followed me to the show.
I had dropped my nickel in our flight down the hill, but Sukie still had hers. We walked slowly home and she bought us both a two-cents seltzer water from Mr. Rathbone. He was a fat little Jew who ran the candy store on our block, together with his wife and round-faced daughter, Rachel. They were nice and lived on 110th Street across from Central Park. Rachel was in her twenties and was the prettiest Jewish girl I ever saw. At least Mr. Rathbone was never fumbling at me, neither was Mr. Lipschwitz, the plumber, who had given us his old furniture and the piano.
It was after six o’clock when I got home but Mother didn’t notice I was late.
“Put the jumper in the box,” she said, as I walked into the kitchen, “then set the table.”
I really didn’t like to jump that box, I was that afraid of electricity. Mother was putting dirty clothes into the double sink to soak. She was always either soaking clothes or scrubbing them or hanging them out on the line. With all of that activity we should have been super clean but somehow we
weren’t. Anyhow, it seemed like the least I could do was put the jumper in, so I dragged a chair under the meter box and climbed up on it. I took the metal wire from behind the box where we hid it, and opening the box, I inserted the two prongs behind the fuse the way Daddy had showed me. I got down from the chair, pulled the light chain, and the light came on.
Our electricity had been cut off for months for nonpayment, so Daddy had made the jumper and we used it in the evenings when it started to get dark. We didn’t keep the jumper in all day because the electric man came around once a month to read the meter and we never knew when he was coming. He used a little gadget to get the meter box hot so he could read it, and by using the jumper, the meter didn’t register.
Daddy said almost everybody in Harlem used a jumper and it was a shame there was no way to jump the gas. When our gas got turned off, we used Mrs. Maceo’s or Mrs. Caldwell’s stove. They used ours a few times, too, so it was all right, but everybody tried to keep the gas from being turned off and thanked God for the electric jumpers.
I started to set the table.
Junior and Sterling came home on time and everybody was in a good mood for a change. After dinner I helped Mother wash and dry the dishes real fast so the roaches wouldn’t have a snack, then we all went into the front room to help Daddy practice for his weekend parties.
The piano Mr. Lipschwitz had given us was real old but Daddy kept it tuned, and though the ivory was off most of the keys, it had a nice, mellow tone. Daddy played by ear and could swing any piece after he heard it only once.
Junior was leaning against the piano singing a new song he had heard on the radio. Daddy picked out the melody the first time around, then put a rocking bass to it and had another song to add to his rep-or-tor, as he called it. Sterling wrote down the names of the songs as me and Junior sang them. Sterling couldn’t sing a lick and neither could Mother, but me and Junior had fairly nice voices, sweet but on the weak side.
“Listen to that bass, dumpling,” Daddy said to me, swinging into “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” “Sounds just like Old Fats, don’t it?”
It tickled Daddy to sound like Fats Waller, who, according to Daddy, was boss man of the ivories. Then Daddy played the blues and began to sing:
Trouble in mind,
I’m blue,
But I won’t be blue always.
The sun’s gonna shine
In my back door someday.
Daddy’s voice was coarse, straining at the high notes, but very spirited. We sang along with him, even Mother, with her no-nothing treble. Sterling had the good grace to hum, off key.
Cold empty bed
Pains in my head
Feel like ol’ Ned
Wish I was dead
What did I do
To be so black and blue?
Then it was ten o’clock and Daddy left for his parties. I sat down at the piano and did a few riffs which sounded pitiful. I just didn’t have Daddy’s talents and that was plain. I had studied music off and on since I was eight—mostly off ’cause though Miss Jackson, my teacher up on 130th Street, only charged a quarter a lesson, Mother didn’t often have that quarter. It didn’t seem fair that I just couldn’t sit down and play like Daddy did but had to go through all that jive of reading music and playing that Blue Danube thing. I picked out “Stormy Weather” with one hand, and then went to bed.
MOTHER said it was a catastrophe.
Daddy said it wasn’t all that bad and for God’s sake don’t go getting hysterical.
What happened was that at the rent parties Daddy played for he had been offered more King Kong than money, and since he was not a drinking man he had accepted his tips in food. He had eaten hoppin’ John and chitlins and fried chicken all weekend long, and had brought home only nine dollars and thirty cents from the three parties instead of the thirty dollars he had expected.
Mother was so mad she was trembling. “I can’t sit around here and watch these children go hungry,” she said. “Either you let me go up in the Bronx and find some day’s work or we’ll have to get on relief. There ain’t no other way.”
Mother kept at it until finally Daddy hollered that a man couldn’t have any peace in his own home and yes, goddammit, go on up in the Bronx and find some work if she wanted to.
On Monday morning Mother took the subway to Grand Concourse. She told me later that she waited on the sidewalk under an awning with the other colored women. When a white lady drove up and asked how much she charged by the hour, Mother said thirty-five cents and was hired for three half days a week by a Mrs. Schwartz.
FOUR
I pushed open the Caldwells’ door which was seldom locked. “Hey, Maude,” I yelled, “you home?”
“You got to shout like that?” Robert asked, coming out of the bedroom. “Ain’t nobody deaf around here. Maude’s in the front room.”
“I’m sorry, Robert.” I walked past him. He sure was one evil black West Indian, and especially so since he lost his precious car. I know that nearly killed him, having to give that car up. When he used to visit Fifth Avenue with Elizabeth before they got dispossessed and had to move in with her mother, he would holler at us kids something awful just ’cause we touched his old shiny chrome.
“Y’all keep your greasy hands off my car,” he would command, and pay one of the boys a nickel to see that we didn’t touch it. He was evil all right, but good looking, with broad shoulders and thick arms and legs.
I went into the front room. Vallie, dressed in a polka-dot dress, was poking about the sofa, looking under the cushions. With his round baby face he looked almost like a girl except for the greasy stocking cap on his head.
“Hello, Vallie.”
“Hi, Francie. Hey, Maude,” he called. “You know where Ma hid my pants?”
“The last place you’d be expected to look for them,” Maude said from the fire escape. “In the clothes closet.”
Vallie went into the bedroom and came back with his pants. He slipped them under the dress which he then whipped off over his head. His mother came into the room. I loved Mrs. Caldwell, she was that jolly and nice and fat and warm with her West Indian accent.
“So, my son, you’ve found your pants, huh?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“You going to come back upstairs tonight at a decent hour?”
“Yes, Ma.”
Mrs. Caldwell sighed. “I don’t know why your father upped and died like he did leaving me with all these problems.”
“You making more problems, Ma, than you have to,” Vallie said. “What you tryin’ to do, make a sissy out of me or something, making me wear Rebecca’s clothes?”
“Better a live sissy than a dead little boy,” she said, going to Vallie and straightening his shirt collar. “Ain’t that right, Francie?”
“I guess so, Mrs. Caldwell.”
Vallie stayed out in the street so much that when he did come home his mother hid his pants and made him wear his sister’s clothes knowing he wouldn’t sneak downstairs dressed like a girl.
“When you come back upstairs,” Mrs. Caldwell told Vallie, “bring me two penny licorice sticks.”
“Okay,” Vallie said, holding out his hand. His mother dropped two cents into it. She dearly loved licorice sticks.
“Francie’s here,” Mrs. Caldwell told Maude. “Come off of that fire escape and talk to her.”
Maude grumbled something but didn’t make a move, so when Sonny hollered down from the roof for Vallie to hurry on up there, I followed him. Sukie was there, too.
“Hey, man,” Sonny said to Vallie. “What took you so long? I called you three times.”
“I had to find my pants.”
“Francie,” Sonny said, looking at me from under his sleepy eyes, “you sure are getting tall for a girl and skin-nay!”
“Hello, Sonny.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, as usual, so I turned to Sukie. “Hi. Where you been all day?”
“Playing jacks with you up till ten minutes ago. What’s the ma
tter, you losin’ your mind or something?”
I could have killed her. She always did that, showed me up in front of the boys.
“Come on,” Sonny said, running toward the back of the roof. “Let’s jump over the alley.” He stopped short at the end of the roof and bowed. “Ladies first.”
I trailed behind them, deciding that no matter how bad they teased me I wasn’t gonna jump. Everybody almost had jumped over that old alley at some time or another except me. Anytime I saw a crowd in the street looking down at something near the alley, I thought that James Junior or Sterling had finally missed and fell while jumping over it, and no amount of teasing could make me do it.
Vallie always teased the most. Now he was saying: “A long-legged gal like you ought to be able to stretch from one side of that alley to the other.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Sukie agreed, and showing off she backed up and with a flying leap jumped to the other roof. Then just to show how easy it was, she jumped back to our side again.
“Go ahead, Francie,” Vallie urged. “Sukie’s legs ain’t even as long as yours.”
“Leave me alone, pretty brown girl,” I said, knowing that would make him mad. Any hint about him wearing Rebecca’s clothes did.
Vallie stopped smiling and leaped at me. In ducking away from him I bumped into Sonny who grabbed my arm.
“Should I throw her over the roof for you, Vallie?” he asked.
Sonny was big for his age and square as a box, and as he held me I thought for a moment that he might not be kidding. Vallie didn’t answer.
“Throw her over,” Sukie said calmly.
“Y’all stop playing like that with me,” I said, nervous now. “I’m gonna tell Junior.”
“You can’t tell nobody nothing if you’re dead, dead, dead,” Sonny said, his eyes half-closed.
“Aw, leave her alone,” Vallie said.
Sonny released me, crossed the divider to the next roof and ran to the door. “Y’all wait here a minute,” he said, “I’ll be right back.” He disappeared inside and a moment later came back out holding a black cat by the nape of its neck. A rope dangled from its head and apparently Sonny had tied the cat to the banister earlier.
Daddy Was a Number Runner Page 4