Rebecca didn’t take me to the movies that afternoon after all. Her mother asked her if she was losing her mind. It was either the movies or the barn dance. Naturally Becky chose the dance, but she gave me a dime for the movies, so I wasn’t mad at her. I had been waiting for Becky all day to make up her mind, so I got to the movies just before the prices, changed at five o’clock.
I hadn’t been there ten minutes before that fat little white man with the bald head who used to try to get me to come up on the roof slid into the seat next to me. I had to giggle. He sure was crazy about Westerns. Almost every time I came to the show by myself he would sit next to me, hand me a dime, and start feeling me under my skirt. We never said a word to each other, he would just hand me the money and start feeling.
I never let him get his hands too far inside my bloomers, though. By the time he worked his way up inside the elastic leg and got too close, I would shift my butt and he would have to start all over again, or I would change my seat.
Today, though, I guess I got too carried away with the picture and almost forgot all about him. Ken Maynard was my favorite. He and the rangers had just butchered a whole tribe of Indians to rescue this girl Ken Maynard liked, and now, in the moonlight, in his shy, sweet way, he was about to kiss her.
I felt a stirring in my stomach. Then I realized that this fat little man had gotten his fingers all the way inside me. I was throbbing down there like a drum. I squirmed. My legs opened wider, and his fingers moved higher. My flesh seemed to rush to meet him. I groaned. I was caving in, all of my insides straining toward that center where his fingers were making me melt. My God. I was on fire.
His hand touched a raw nerve and a streak of pain ripped through me. I snapped my legs shut, imprisoning his fingers. Violently, I tore his hand away and flung it back at him. I stood up, and stumbled down the aisle and into the street.
I went flying down 116th Street, that strange throbbing between my legs. It was wet down there. I could feel it collecting in my bloomers. I turned the corner at Fifth Avenue and raced home.
Mother was in her bedroom talking to Mrs. Caldwell through the window. I tiptoed into the bathroom and pulled down my bloomers with shaking fingers. It was wet all right. Goopy. Mother would kill me. I pulled off the bloomers and dabbed at the goop with a wet washcloth.
Why had I felt like that? That man was always following me because he knew he could make me feel that way. The memory of my opening my legs wider filled me with shame. That’s the way those girls acted in the True Confessions magazines, and they always came to a bad end. When I read about them kissing and messing around, it always made me tingle down there—that’s why I read that stuff—but it was nothing like when that man was feeling me. If Mother saw these dirty pants she’d know I’d been doing something bad and she’d whip me with the thick end of the razor strop.
I scrubbed my bloomers harder. The fear came that somehow my guilt would show. Then I had a stupid thought: Maybe that’s the way babies were made. My mind dashed about madly but I made it stop. I knew good and well you had to fuck to make a baby. Sukie said they put their thing inside you. It was a nasty, filthy thing to do, and I decided then and there that no man was ever going to put his thing inside me.
When I went to bed that night I couldn’t sleep. I scratched and smashed bedbugs by the hundreds and finally gave in to my latest daydream.
I was standing downstairs on the stoop and he came thundering down Fifth Avenue on his great white horse. Ken Maynard. I ran out into the street and without even slowing up, he bent down and swooped me up in his arms, setting me on the saddle behind him. I took one last look at the bell tower in Mt. Morris Park before we rode out of Harlem and into the sunset.
Just before I fell asleep, the memory of that man’s hand inside me knotted up my stomach again, and I wondered sadly if I was gonna come to a bad end.
SEVEN
AFTER Labor Day we went back to school, that is Sterling and I did, James Junior went back to playing hooky. Sterling was going downtown to high school, grumbling that all the white kids wore better clothes than he did and had long pants while he was still knocking about in his knickers. Daddy told him he should have appreciated that nice suit with the long pants he got him from the pawnshop because God knows when he’d get the money to buy him another one.
We didn’t have any money at all, and that was the truth. When we got our relief check each month all we did was take it across the street to Mr. Burnett, the West Indian grocer, and pay him what we owed. This left us with nothing so the next day we started buying on credit again. Daddy said we’d never get out the hole that way.
It got so I hated to go across the street to Mr. Burnett’s with our credit book clutched in my hand ’cause his wife would look at you cross-eyed after you ordered all those bags of groceries then held out that book instead of money. And their snotty little daughter, Yolanda, was worse yet. It got so bad that both me and Rebecca hated to set foot in that store and she would cry when her mother sent her there to buy something on credit.
Today I was in the kitchen shelling some peas when Mother gave me a list of things to get from Mr. Burnett and handed me the credit book. I tried to pull a Rebecca by poking out my mouth and saying I didn’t want to go. Mother looked at me like I was crazy.
“Don’t give me no lip, Francie. Take that book across the street and get those groceries or I’ll blister your behind again with the thick end of the strop.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And get three kaiser rolls from the baker’s.” She handed me a nickel.
I left in a hurry, but sat down on the fourth landing to think over how bad things were getting. Yesterday was the first time in my life I had been whipped with the thick end of the strop and here Mother was threatening to do it again. I needed a nickel so bad yesterday that when I saw Mr. Edwards and he didn’t offer me one I sort of suggested it to him. He gave me a dime, then squealed to Mother soon’s she came home from work.
The first thing Mother said to me when she came through the door, mad as she could be, was: “Get me the razor strop.” Since nobody else was there except her and me, I was worried about her asking for that strop like that.
“You gonna beat me?” I asked. “What did I do?”
“How many times I got to tell you, Francie, that if somebody got something for you they’ll give it to you without you having to ask for it. Go get me the strop.”
Mr. Edwards, I thought. The bastard had ratted on me. I went into the bathroom and got the strop and walked back outside. I handed it to Mother and backed away.
“I only asked him for a nickel, Mother, and it wasn’t like asking a stranger.” She moved toward me and I saw with horror how she was holding that strop. “You ain’t gonna beat me with the thick end?” I couldn’t believe it and knocked over a chair getting out of her way.
Mother kept on coming. “I ain’t gonna chase you all over this room,” she said, and snatched me and dragged me into her bedroom, flinging me down on the bed. I was too long legged to be put across her lap, so she sort of kneeled on my back and pulled down my bloomers with one hand, raising the strop with the other.
“I told you before and I ain’t gonna tell you again. Don’t beg nobody for nothing.”
Each word was punctuated with a lash on my bare behind, and each lash raised a welt and a scream from me until I was hoarse.
“Don’t beg nobody for nothing.”
Mother beat me so long I think her arm got tired.
I had asked Mr. Edwards for that nickel so I could have fifteen cents to eat at Father Divine’s ’cause all we had at home was leftover cabbage which hadn’t been too tasty yesterday. The only other thing was that gold-can jive and nobody in their right mind would eat that mess. Anyway, after Mr. Edwards gave me the money, I walked up to 130th Street to get one of Father’s delicious chicken dinners. Peace, it’s wonderful.
Father Divine’s place was in a basement apartment. I paid my fifteen cents at the door and
found a seat at a round table in the middle of the room, crowded with men, women, and children, all eating silently. Some of them were Father’s followers—I could tell by their nappy heads—but others were just hungry people like me.
One of Father’s angels, a huge black woman dressed in a bed sheet, brought me a plate of golden brown chicken from the kitchen. She nodded toward the bread and vegetables on the table, meaning for me to help myself. Instead of grace you had to praise Father’s holy name, so I turned to the man next to me and said: “Father Divine is God, would you please pass me that plate of blackeye peas?”
When I finished eating I walked back home, skirting Mt. Morris Park. I liked the food at Father Divine’s, you got plenty to eat for your fifteen cents, but I always had to come alone. Nobody would come with me, not Sukie or Rebecca or even Maude. They were ashamed of those nappy-headed angels who wouldn’t straighten their hair and wore white robes and changed their names to Beloved Theresa or Sweet Morning Glory when they entered Father’s kingdom.
No, I thought now, as I got up off the steps and went on downstairs to go to the store, that dinner sure wasn’t worth my whipping.
Rebecca was sitting on my stoop talking to Duke from 119th Street. He was a raggedy black boy and I don’t know what Rebecca saw in him.
“I don’t have to go to Mr. Burnett’s no more,” she bragged. “I told my mother this morning I just wasn’t going.”
“Did she slap you up side your head?” I asked.
“No, she sent Maude instead.”
There was something chilly about Maude. What I mean is she didn’t get all hot and bothered about things like me and Rebecca did. Maude went with me now to get the gold-can jive and prunes from the relief office and to a church on 121st Street where we got day-old bread for five cents a loaf.
I went to the bakery first, wishing I had a younger sister to send to the store.
“Three poppy-seed rolls,” I told Max who was standing behind the high counter. He was so short his pinpoint head could just be seen over the top. I looked at the cinnamon buns in the case, wishing I had a nickel to buy me some.
Max saw me looking at them and when he handed me the bag of rolls he said: “You want a cinnamon bun, Francie?”
“I don’t have no more money,” I said, handing him the nickel for the rolls.
He put a cinnamon bun in the bag. “Come in the back for a minute,” he said.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I got to go to the grocery store for my mother.”
He took the cinnamon bun back.
The stingy bastard, I thought, as I crossed the street slowly, dreading every step of the way. Max shoulda given me a bun for that free feel he got last night. I’d been playing ringoleevio with the Twins and Sukie and went and hid in the telephone booth in Max’s store. He had come with the broom and pretended to be sweeping in front of the booth and got himself a good feel before I was able to get out of there.
A group of boys was walking down the street and wouldn’t you know they’d stop right in front of the grocery store to cut up? I moaned my bad luck. They made me feel so miserable that ordinarily to avoid passing them I’d cross the street. But there was no escaping them today.
“Skeebopadee, this skinny one’s for me,” the blackest boy of the bunch yelled.
I braced myself, staring straight ahead, and walked past them.
“You give me yours and I’ll give you mine,” another boy hollered. “I’m talking ’bout your cherry.” He did a tap dance, poking out his belly at me, and the other boys broke up laughing.
I escaped into the store, but my luck was still bad. It wasn’t Mr. Burnett, a jolly West Indian, behind the counter, but his fat yellow wife. And Yolanda, nine, light-skinned and plump like her mother, with long braids hanging down her back, was perched on a high stool next to the rice sack.
“Hello, Mrs. Burnett. Hello, Yolanda.”
They both grunted at me. “Three pounds of rice,” I read from the list, adding as Mrs. Burnett went to the five cents a pound sack, “Three pounds for ten cents.” She grunted again and scooped up the cheaper rice. “Ten cents’ worth of dried herrings.”
“They’s fifteen cents a pound.”
“My mother only wants ten cents’ worth.” My voice was barely above a whisper.
She threw the herrings on the scale and snatched them off before I could see how much she had given me. I read the rest of the items off the list and watched as Mrs. Burnett wrote the prices on a large paper bag and added them up.
“That will be two dollars and ninety-eight cents.”
I caught my breath and held out the credit book. It seemed like forever I was holding that book out and she looking at it like she never saw it before, which was silly. She saw it almost every day.
“When do you all get your relief check?” she asked.
“The first of the month, Mrs. Burnett.” She knew it was the first. She knew it, she knew it. Finally, she took the book, grumbling under her breath, wrote the figure on it and threw it on top of the groceries. She pushed the bag toward me and I picked it up from the counter.
All of this time Yolanda’s black button eyes were burning a hole in my back. She never played with the rest of us and I don’t know why me and Rebecca let her get on our nerves. After all, she was only nine, going on ten, but she sat there on that stool, silent and snotty, making me feel that it was not only her store but her world and I had no place in it.
But being in hock to the grocer wasn’t enough to make our social worker, Madame Queen, happy. The next time she came to check up on us she told Daddy he had to be making some extra money somewhere ’cause we spent more on rent and food than what the relief gave us. She was right. Daddy wasn’t bringing home hardly anything from his numbers, but Mother was still working three half days for Mrs. Schwartz and Sterling brought home a couple of bucks now and then from his shoeshining.
“I ain’t working, Miss Peters,” Daddy told her. “How many times I have to tell you that.” He was standing up straight and tall, looking down at her sitting at our dining-room table, her papers and figures spread out before her. I hoped her glasses would pinch her nose off.
“Is anybody in this household working, Adam?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand then how you can pay your rent and food and gas bill.”
“We manages, Miss Peters.”
“But where do you get the money from if no one is working?”
“We just gets it somehow.”
“Then somebody is bringing in extra money.”
“No, Miss Peters. We don’t have one dime except what you all give us.”
They kept at it like that for ten minutes more and I could have slapped her yellow face for pushing Daddy into a corner like that.
When she finally left, Daddy said wearily: “They don’t give you enough money to live on so you have to bootleg some kind of work, then they want to deduct that from your relief check, too. I wonder how they expect you to live. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to mess with those people?” But for once he didn’t shout, seeming to be more tired than angry.
I HAD been upstairs playing jacks with Maude and was going home now, but it was too dark to go over the roof so I was running down the stairs. I stopped short when I saw Sonny on the ground floor.
“Hello, Sonny.”
“Hello, Francie.”
I walked slowly down the last steps.
“Come on,” Sonny said, dancing around and aiming his fist at my jaw, “let’s box.”
I threw up my hands to protect myself and backed up. The next thing I knew we were in the shadows behind the stairs and Sonny was leaning all over me, pulling my dress up.
“I don’t wanna box no more,” I said. “I wanna go home.”
“Let me put it in you for a minute, Francie.” Then his bare flesh, hot and wet and hard, was on my thigh. “Open your legs a little, Francie.”
“No.” Suddenly, I was scared. I tried to dodge around h
im but he reached out with one arm and flung me back against the wall.
“It won’t hurt, Francie.” He was rubbing himself up and down against me, one hand beneath the elastic leg of my bloomers and the other at my waist trying to pull my bloomers down.
“No. I don’t wanna.”
Frantic now, I held on to my bloomers with both hands, but they were slowly being forced down as Sonny poked his thing at me and tried to stick it over the top of my bloomers.
I stopped struggling for a moment to get my breath. Just as my bloomers were about to slide down over my knees, I wrenched free and hauled them back up. Sonny grabbed me again.
Then we heard somebody bouncing down the stairs singing. I held my breath and Sonny stopped his jiggling, both of us listening for the front door to slam. But instead, the singing came closer. I recognized Value’s voice just before I saw him heading for the dark under the stairs. He had on one of Rebecca’s cotton dresses and he was pulling up his knickers. He took the dress off and bundled it into a ball. He was whistling now, walking toward us to hide that dress under the stairs, I thought.
Sonny buttoned up his pants, his fingers stumbling in haste, and I pulled my dress down.
“Hold your hands up higher,” Sonny suddenly hollered, and went into his fighter’s stance. I just stood there, scared and dumb.
“Who’s that back there?” Vallie asked.
Sonny danced out into the light, shadowboxing. “Me and Francie,” he said. “I was showing her how Joe Louis delivers his powerhouse upper-right cross. Pow.” Sonny aimed one at Vallie’s chin. Vallie ducked. Sonny laughed and shadowboxed himself right out into the vestibule. The door slammed shut behind him.
I walked toward Vallie, looking everywhere except at him.
“What was you doing behind the stairs with Sonny?” he asked.
“What?”
“He screw you?”
“You crazy or somethin’?”
“What was you doing back there with him?”
“We was boxing.”
“That’s what they call it now, huh?”
Daddy Was a Number Runner Page 8