by Larry Elder
“I promised myself when I had kids,” he said, “I was not goin’ to treat them like my daddy did me.”
It was beyond strange to hear him say, “daddy.”
“And do you think you treated us better than your father did?”
“I know I did.”
That’s delusional, I said to myself. Absolutely delusional.
“Why don’t I start at the beginnin’,” he said.
He was born in Athens, Georgia. That much I knew. And I knew that he was an only child. Beyond that, neither he nor my mother talked about his childhood. Whenever I asked, I got a one- or two-word response. The topic was off-limits, and after a while I stopped caring. Besides, what difference did it make? Whatever his background, whatever he went through, why exact vengeance on us? Whatever happened in his life, we were innocent bystanders. We were blameless.
“You were afraid of your father?” I said.
“I thought I told you all this before.”
He hadn’t. I knew next to nothing about him.
“Elder isn’t really my name. I don’t know what my real last name is. And if you didn’t have a daddy, kids called you, behind your back, an ‘outside kid.’ So it hurt, hurt a lot.”
Elder, Will Elder, was one of the many men his mother “took up with.”
“You never saw your biological father?”
“No. And whoever he was, he didn’t leave us. He was never around to leave. I never knew him. Never saw him. Least not that I can remember. And when I asked my mother about him, she changed the subject. So I just gave up askin’.”
“Why use Will Elder’s name out of all of them?”
“He was in my life the longest. So I just started usin’ his last name, I guess.”
They lived briefly on a farm where Will worked as a sharecropper. Dad helped work in the field picking cotton during the summer and after school.
“But then we moved to town.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Rent, I think. We couldn’t pay. We moved a lot, you know, one step ahead of the landlord. I was fine with leavin’ the farm because I hated farmin’. Wanted nothin’ to do with it.”
Dad didn’t remember how long they stayed in Athens, but it wasn’t long. Then it was off to Tampa, Florida.
“Why Tampa?”
“Will Elder got a job workin’ construction. I think they were buildin’ a bridge or a highway or somethin’.”
Dad kept referring to him as “Will Elder.” Will Elder did this. Will Elder said that. Will Elder worked there.
“Did you call him ‘Dad’?”
“I called him Daddy because my mother made me. But I knew he wasn’t my father. In fact, for I long time, I didn’t know who my mother was.”
He spoke softly. A man tapped on the door and Dad pointed to the sign: “Closed.”
“You didn’t know who your mother was?”
“Or, let me put it this way, I thought the wrong person was my mother.”
He was playing in the yard with some kids. He looked up and noticed his aunt coming down the street toward the house where he and his mother rented a room.
“Yonder come Aunt Covey,” he shouted. The woman, his mother’s younger sister, visited from time to time.
“That ain’t none of yo’ aunt,” one of the kids said, “that’s yo’ momma.”
“No it ain’t. Nanna is my momma.”
“That ain’t what my momma said.”
“Well yo’ momma is a lie.”
“No she ain’t.” Other kids joined in and sided with the kid. “No she ain’t!”
“Yes she is.”
“No, she ain’t. Yo’ momma is Covey. My momma said so, too.”
“So did mine,” said another.
“She’s a lie, too.”
“Don’t you call my momma a lie.”
“Well, she is too a lie.”
This led to a fight. After the scuffle, he ran into the house.
“Nanna, they say you ain’t my momma. Tell me they lyin’.”
“Ran, sit down.”
Nanna admitted that she was really his grandmother, and that Covey was not his aunt, but his mother. Everyone knew it, except my father.
“Why were you lied to?” I asked.
“It was a shame not bein’ able to raise your own kid. And Covey, my mother, had me—as they say—illegitimately. That made it even worse. In those days, people wouldn’t even let their kids go into the home of a woman who had an ‘outside kid.’ Covey didn’t have the money to raise a kid and I didn’t have a daddy. So I lived with Nanna. For some reason, it’s less of a shame to be raised by a grandmother than a single mother.”
“How old were you when you found out who your mother was?”
“Five.”
He said nothing for several seconds. And then he pulled a paper napkin from the little dispenser on the counter.
“’Scuse me. Sorry about that.”
It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. I didn’t know he could. Here he was, wiping his eyes, almost unable to speak. What should I say? “It’s okay, Dad?” “Are you all right, Dad?” What? I didn’t say anything.
“When I found out,” he said, “I couldn’t stop cryin’.”
He loved his grandmother. She made him feel loved and safe. He didn’t even like Covey, who seemed to pop up from time to time, never staying long and never really showing any affection toward him.
“I think I’m from some man she barely knew. Doubt she even knew which man. If she did, I think she looked at me and maybe I reminded her of him.”
One day, Covey came for him.
“I ran outside. They didn’t find me for three hours.”
He told Nanna that he didn’t want to leave her. But Covey took him.
He stayed with her for a couple of weeks. She ran out of money and returned him. Then she came back, kept him for a couple of months, and returned him again. This went on for at least a couple of years. One day, she came for him for good. It was the last time he saw his grandmother. It was the last time he felt secure.
Again we sat, silent, for several seconds. He pulled out another napkin.
“What name did they write on your birth certificate?” I asked.
“What birth certificate?” He laughed, “I wasn’t born in no hospital like you kids—with a doctor and nurses. People down there used a midwife. Nobody with any trainin’, just somebody who seemed like she knew what she was doin’. I was born in a room we rented.”
There is no record of his birth, not even a line written in the family Bible. There was no family Bible. Covey and Nanna were illiterate.
“How do you know your birth date?”
“I don’t.” He knew the year, but didn’t know the month and day.
When he enrolled in school, the lady who registered him asked him his date of birth.
“‘Don’t know,’ I told her. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘May 25.’”
“Why May 25?” I asked.
“It was that lady’s birthday.”
“Well, I guess she had a one in 365 chance of getting it right.”
He laughed. “As long as I wasn’t born on the last day in February in a leap year. With my luck, I probably was.”
“What kind of father was Will?”
“Only half worked, drank and—well, he was a bad drunk.”
“Abusive?”
When Will got his paycheck, he’d bring it home where Covey would keep it to prevent him from gambling it away. Then he’d get drunk and demand it back.
“Why she wouldn’t give it to him, I have no idea. He’d beat her and take it. Then the next time he got paid, he’d bring her the check, get drunk, beat her, and take it back. She knew she’d get a beatin’, but she never gave it back—least not right away. Damn silly.”
“‘Please give it to him,’ I used to say. ‘Please just give it to him.’ She’d say, ‘No, we got to eat.’”
This ritual re-played itself over and over. He brought
home his money, gave it to Covey, got drunk, beat her, and took the money back, then gambled it away. Dad tried to intervene “a couple of times,” but he was small and got knocked to the ground. Covey told him to “stay out of it.”
“Did he beat you, too?”
He did.
“And it could be over the silliest thing, and he did it when he was drunk or sober. He beat me once for not callin’ him ‘sir.’ It was ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir,’ or else get a beatin’.”
“What did he beat you with?”
He balled up his hands. “His fists.”
I shook my head.
“But I’ll tell you, I promised myself when the time was right, I was goin’ to kill him.”
After Tampa, the work ended for Will Elder. So he put my dad and Covey in his old car. Through relatives, he had arranged a construction job in Memphis. But the car broke down several times along the way before konking out completely in Chattanooga. It would be days, if not weeks, before it could be repaired. And there was no money to fix it anyway. So the car just sat, and Will Elder found work. They rented a room and stayed in Chattanooga.
Then one day Will was gone. His mother cried for days, but soon another man moved in. Then he left and another moved in. One day, my dad came home from school.
“And I just resented the son-of-a-bitch bein’ there. I took off one of my boots—plop!—dropped it loud on the floor. The man said, ‘Stop all that noise.’ I took off the other one—plop!—dropped it.”
“Dammit, boy, stop makin’ all that noise!” the man said.
“I will not. This is my room, not yours.”
“He’s right, boy,” Dad’s mother said, “stop makin’ all that noise.”
“This is my room. He should just leave.”
“No, it ain’t, it’s my room. And I’ll have who I want in it. Now quiet.”
“Then I’m leavin’,” my dad said.
“Hah, good. Take your hungry ass away from here,” Covey said.
Dad got dressed, put a few things in a sack, and walked out.
As he walked down the street, Covey shouted at him through the window. “You’ll be back! Else either be in the cemetery or the penitentiary.”
Dad turned to me and raised his right hand. “And as my hand is to God, I’ve never spent a day in my life in jail. But I never went back. And I ain’t dead—yet.”
He was thirteen the day he left home.
10
A HARD-ASS LIFE
I remembered Dad sending his mother money. When I started working for him, every Friday he’d hand me an envelope with her name and her Athens, Georgia, address.
“Take this to the mailbox,” he’d say.
“What’s in it?” I once asked.
“Do as I say and just take it and put it in the mailbox.”
So I asked my mother. “Your father sends his mother money every week. I don’t know why, the way she treated him. And we could use that money.”
But every Friday he handed me an envelope, and every Friday I’d put it in the mailbox.
I started to ask him why he did it, given the way she’d treated him, but I wanted to hear what happened after he left his mother. I had so many questions. You left home for good? What about school? How did you survive?
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Didn’t have time to be scared.”
He had already decided to stop going to school. Through the eighth grade, all the boys wore short pants. When the school year started for the ninth grade, everybody wore the “long pants.” But his mother couldn’t afford them and resented him for wanting them.
“What’s wrong with yo’ shorts?” she said. “Ain’t no holes in ’em.”
He explained that it would be embarrassing to wear them. Nobody—no matter how poor, “and everybody was poor”—still wore shorts in the ninth grade.
“Only thing that’s embarrassin’ is you,” she said. “I ain’t buyin’ no long pants. You get you a job and buy yo’ own damn pants.”
“Wouldn’t you have to drop out of school to get the money for the pants?” I asked.
“She didn’t care. I already had more ‘book learnin’ than she did, and she thought school was a waste of time.”
“What happened to your mother?”
He said at some point, Covey went back to Athens, where she had friends or family. There, Covey had someone write a letter to give Dad her address. “Outside of the time I went to see her when I got out of the service, I never saw her again.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Anyways, when I left, that’s when I went up on the mountain and started lookin’ for work.”
“The mountain?”
The mountain, he explained, was Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, “where some white families with a little bit of money might give me some work.”
The thirteen-year-old knocked on doors, did odd jobs, and slept in barns—anything to make a little money.
“I’d eat shit with a splinter rather than to go back to that room with my mother and the boyfriend.”
Soon a family hired him full-time to clean around the yard, hoe the garden, and pick berries. The family also had a cook and she made more money. Plus she worked and slept inside the house, which was a lot more comfortable than his place on the floor in the barn. After chores, he’d sit with her in the kitchen, watch her prepare dinner and bake desserts, and ask questions. When nobody was home, he’d go in the kitchen and try to prepare a meal.
“At first, everythin’ came out bad. I’d throw it away and start again. Fix somethin’, throw it away. I don’t know how many cakes and pies I ruined. One day, the cook got sick and left the house for several days. So I made dinner—meat, sweet potatoes, greens, and baked a cake. The man of the house sat down at the table. After dinner, he said, ‘I guess she’s feelin’ better now. That girl really outdid herself this time.’ The woman said, ‘That wasn’t none of her’ and she pointed to me, ‘that little rascal fixed all this.’ ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘we got ourselves a new cook.’”
He never did yard work again. He became popular with the family’s friends who came for dinner. He improved and learned fancier dishes. He asked for more money. The family refused. He left and started working for another family at twice the money.
“After a while, I wanted more money. So I decided to leave the mountain for town, to see what I could pick up.”
He worked a bunch of jobs, each one paying more than the last. First he shined shoes. “I knew I could do better, so then I started deliverin’ ice.”
A “cheatin’ black man” hired him to drive a horse-drawn delivery cart to carry blocks of ice, which people used to put inside their home “ice box”—a big container where food was placed below and around a block of ice.
“It got so the guy half wouldn’t pay me. I was drivin’ those horses all day and half the night. And he still half paid me and never on time.”
After weeks of no payment or partial payment, the boss owed my father $3.10. “You don’t know. $3.10 durin’ the Depression. Shi-i-i-it.”
He kept asking and kept getting put off. The man operated out of a little office, and Dad went there “to see about my money.” While the secretary “or assistant or whatever she was” made Dad wait, the man sneaked out of a back door. It was a maneuver, Dad later learned, that the man and the secretary pulled many times on other employees. Most workers just quit and wrote it off as a lesson learned. The man just hired someone new and repeated the process.
“I said, ‘Shi-i-i-it, I’ll be damned.’ I went and got me this piece-of-crap gun—probably would have blown up in my face if I’d ’a shot it—and this time I went though his back door. He was sitting at his desk.
“‘I want my money,’ I said.
“‘I don’t have it,’ he said.
“I said, ‘I want my Goddamn money!’
“He started to get up, but I pushed him back down. I pulled up my shirt to show him the gun.”
Shaking, the man reached in his drawer and counted out three dollars.
“Then I said, ‘And I want my damn dime!’”
A man with two little boys walked by on the sidewalk, saw my dad and I, and waved.
“Don’t know the father’s name,” Dad said, “but the kids are Carlos and, I think, Juan. On hot days, I give them ice cream cones.”
The kids were bouncing up and down, “Hi, Randy!”
After the ice delivery job, he worked as a bowling pin “set-up man.” Before the days when machines picked up and re-set the bowling pins, a guy at the other end of the lane rolled the ball back and manually set up the pins.
“Whites only?”
“There was a black bowlin’ alley, but you couldn’t make this kind of money. Anyway, did that for a few months.”
The bowling alley was directly across the street from a hotel.
“I used to watch the valets run to the cars, get out the bags, and collect tip money from the folks checkin’ into the hotel. ‘That’s for me,’ I said to myself. There was a black hotel, but you couldn’t get this kind of tip money.”
He got hired.
“Pretty soon I was doin’ everythin’. I took bags up to the rooms, made the beds, cleaned the rooms, swept the floors, washed windows, pretty much ran the kitchen. Everythin’ but check people in and out and handle money. Didn’t trust ‘you people’ to handle money. But it got so that hotel couldn’t run without me.”
He did this for about three years.
“I worked every day, 365 days a year. Never took a day off. One day, Christmas Day, I didn’t come in because I was sick as a dog. Guy wanted to fire me. I said to myself, ‘Shit, one day off in three years and he wants to fire me. Hell, no.’”
He saw that some of the men left the hotel business and started “runnin’ on the road.” They became railroad Pullman porters. Pullman was the largest employer of blacks in the country. The company rejected far more applicants than they accepted. It was an elite job for blacks, and quite an honor to be hired as a Pullman porter.
“You had to be sharp.”
They had a union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Phillip Randolph. The first—and easily the most powerful—black union in the country, it pushed to improve working conditions for Pullman porters and for other working-class blacks.