Betty Before X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  Ollie Mae actually said yes to me working for Mr. Malloy, but only twice a week and only if I keep my grades up. She said no to me joining the Housewives’ League, but I’m not too upset about that. I haven’t even convinced Suesetta to join yet, and the more I think about it, going door-to-door in the cold isn’t the best way to spend a Saturday.

  Finally, after fifteen more minutes of waiting, Kay says, “Okay, I’m ready.”

  We head outside and walk down the block to the trolley. We get on the line headed in the direction of J.L.’s and go straight to the back of the car. The closer we get to J.L.’s, the more white folk get on. Once we arrive, there are hardly any Negroes in sight. The people shopping, the people working behind the counter, the models in the advertisements—all white.

  The only people who aren’t white are the ones operating the elevators. Kay says, “You two stay close to me, okay?”

  Walking through J.L.’s, I notice all the white people looking at us. But they quickly look away to avoid meeting our eyes, except for the little girl who is staring at me right now. She is holding on to her mother’s hand, eyes big and looking right at me. I wave. She looks away, too, like she didn’t even see me saying hello.

  When we get to Toytown, we stare inside the display windows. There’s a whole Christmas scene with a train riding around a snowy track. I see all the miniature townsmen and townswomen stationed throughout this imaginary village. All of the figurines are white. Not one Negro.

  We walk into the store. I try not to notice if anyone is looking at us. I just keep my eyes focused on the toys, trying to find the aisle where I can get a play tea set for Shirley. “There they are!” Suesetta shouts. She is pointing to a long shelf ahead of us. There are all kinds of tea sets displayed. I choose the set that has enough dishes for me, Shirley, Jimmie, Juanita, and even Juanita’s imaginary friend to each have our tea. Kay helps me get the box down and Suesetta grabs one, too, for Bernice.

  As we wait our turn at the register, a white woman steps in front of us. At first I think maybe she is passing through to get to the other side of this crowded store, but she sets her items down on the cash register counter. I look up at Kay, who is looking furious but not saying anything.

  I want her to say something. I want to say something. I want to say, Excuse me, ma’am, but we’re standing here. Don’t you see us?

  The woman pays for her things, collects her shopping bags from the clerk, and walks out of the store, not looking back, not even thanking us for letting her cut in front of us.

  The man at the counter doesn’t speak or look us in the eye. He doesn’t make small talk with us about the weather, like he did with the woman. When I pay him, he takes my money and that’s it. No Thank you. No Merry Christmas. Nothing. I take my bag without saying thank you and Kay nudges me. “Mind your manners,” she whispers.

  “Thank you, sir,” I mumble.

  He just looks at me.

  We walk away.

  “They were rude,” I say. “That woman just stood in front of us like we were invisible—and that man didn’t even say thank you.”

  Kay and Suesetta don’t say anything.

  “Don’t you think they were rude?”

  “Yes,” Kay says. “But that’s just the way they are. You know that.”

  “Yeah, Betty, what did you expect?” Suesetta asks.

  I don’t know what I expected. I just know that I want to leave this place right now. I think maybe coming to J.L.’s was the worst idea ever. I think about Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Malloy and the Housewives’ League. They are right. We wouldn’t be treated like this in the Negro community.

  Kay says, “Just one more stop and then we can go.” She points to a shoe store.

  “Do we have to?” I ask. It’s not like she really needs another pair of shoes.

  “I’ll be quick,” Kay says. “I just want to look.”

  We walk over to the area where people are trying on shoes and Kay stops in the middle of the aisle. “These are so pretty,” she says.

  Kay reaches for a pair of strappy black suede heels and before her hand touches them, a white clerk grabs the shoes. “Interested in trying these on?” she asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kay says.

  So much for just looking.

  She sits down on the chair next to a white woman who is also trying on shoes.

  “Do you have your shoe insert?” the store clerk asks.

  “My shoe insert?”

  The woman gives us a look like we should know what she’s talking about. I look around and notice a Negro woman who has a small child with her. The little boy has his shoe off and his mother is putting cardboard cutouts of his feet into the shoes he wants to try on. The store clerk points. “You can’t try on shoes unless you use shoe inserts,” she tells us.

  I can see that this rule doesn’t apply to everyone because the white woman next to us is trying on a pair of high heels in her bare feet.

  “Do you have shoe inserts?” the store clerk asks again.

  Kay looks down at the floor and her voice dissolves into a soft vapor. “No, ma’am. No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I can’t let you try on shoes,” the woman says.

  Kay stands, looks at me and Suesetta, and says, “Come on. Let’s go.”

  I don’t move. “But this isn’t fair—”

  “Betty, let’s go,” Kay says.

  “But—”

  “Betty.”

  We walk out of the shoe store, none of us saying a word. Kay walks with her head down. Suesetta, too. We go outside, wait for the trolley, hop on board, pay our money, take our seats. It isn’t until we are walking to Suesetta’s that I break the silence and say, “We have nothing to feel bad about. That wasn’t fair, and they don’t deserve our money anyway if we can’t even try on their shoes.”

  My heart is throbbing. I can’t stop thinking about all those people who were looking at us, like our feelings didn’t matter. The store clerk who wouldn’t let Kay try on shoes because she didn’t have a silly piece of cardboard. The woman who stepped in front of us, walking through us like we were wafts of smoke. The way the man took my money and didn’t even wish me a nice day.

  I think about the Housewives’ League and how what they are doing isn’t just about coupons or extravagant banquets, but about not wanting any of us to ever walk into a store and not be greeted in a courteous manner or treated with dignity, like human beings.

  I turn to Suesetta and before I can even say anything, she says, “I’ll join with you.”

  Now all I have to do is convince Ollie Mae.

  Six

  I can’t sleep. Juanita and I have been back in bed for a while now. She is snoring, and for once, Shirley is on her side of the bed. I close my eyes, try to stop my mind from wandering, but it is skipping from memory to memory.

  Summer days with my Aunt Fannie Mae.

  Country rain showers and magnolia flowers.

  My Grandma Matilda and her pecan trees.

  Lynched bodies dangling in the country breeze.

  Detroit.

  Ollie Mae.

  Mrs. Malloy.

  Bethel AME Church.

  Pastor Peck.

  Pastor Dames.

  Suesetta and Phyllis.

  Toytown.

  Shoe inserts.

  The Housewives’ League.

  Ebony magazine.

  Billy Eckstine.

  Straight hair.

  Brown skin.

  I roll over, try to find a more comfortable position so I can sleep. But instead, more thoughts, more questions, more memories.

  I think back to two years ago, 1943.

  Detroit was having some kind of war. But Ollie Mae and Arthur wouldn’t talk to us about it.

  At church one week, the deacons were praying to the Lord for peace, and Mrs. Duncan and a few other ladies cried through the entire service. Every prayer prayed that Sunday was asking the Lord to end the world’s war overseas and to stop the race riot against Neg
roes right here in America, and to bring innocent family members back home from jail alive.

  I remember that at the end of service, the congregation took up a collection for Mrs. Duncan. Her son, Roger, had been killed during the riots, and she needed help paying for his funeral. I didn’t go to the funeral, but I know that Mrs. Duncan hasn’t looked the same since she buried her son. She smiles sometimes, but not like she used to. She still shouts out “Thank you, Jesus” every now and then, but it doesn’t sound the same. Sounds like a person who is saying thank you to be polite, not because they are really grateful.

  Not long after that, I found Arthur’s newspaper on the table in the kitchen. It was full of pictures showing Detroit on fire, Detroit in a rage. A car was turned on its side, flames rising to the sky like the burning bush we learned about in Sunday school.

  There was a photograph of a colored man being attacked by a white mob in the middle of the street. There were so many of them, but the colored man was all by himself, had no one to protect him. Looked like two police officers were escorting him to get through the mob. But it was hard to tell who the policemen were actually helping.

  Other pages of the newspaper had photographs of burning buildings, boarded-up stores, and desolate streets. At the top of the page, the headline was printed in real big letters. I read it slow. Sounded out each word. “Race Riots Kill More than 20, Injure 700.”

  “Why are all the grownups fighting?” I asked. I didn’t even mean to say it out loud.

  Ollie Mae must have heard me, because she appeared out of nowhere and snatched the newspaper right out of my hands. “You have enough years ahead of you to know pain, Betty Dean.” She tore the newspaper into pieces, threw it away. It was the first time I ever saw tears in Ollie Mae’s eyes. She didn’t let any of them fall, but I saw them gathering. I heard the way she took a deep breath, then released it, then took one more. I saw her keep her back to me, wipe her face, then turn around and keep on going like nothing was bothering her at all. And all I could think about for days after was, Where do uncried tears go?

  I remember wanting to take the torn pieces of newspaper out of the garbage, put all of the letters back together to make words again. People died. Didn’t seem right to bury their stories in the trash.

  Ollie Mae couldn’t really keep me from knowing what was going on, not with Arthur listening to the radio every morning before he left for work. He’d sit right in front of it with his coffee and listen to the news. The radio was made of dark-brown wood, square with three knobs at the bottom. One knob to change the station, one to adjust the sound, and the other to turn it on or off.

  I lie in bed thinking about those days when the streets smelled like smoke and ash, when the stores where we’d just bought candy were closed and all boarded up. Ollie Mae just kept living like people weren’t dying outside our door.

  I remember one Sunday, Mrs. Malloy stood at the podium at the end of service. She led the congregation in prayer, asking the Lord to comfort all the families who had lost loved ones in the protests and riots. She pleaded with everyone to come together and to volunteer to clean up the neighborhoods and help restore the Negro businesses that had been destroyed. She said we must not allow fear to keep us at home. She said we need the support of one another. The ushers began passing out volunteer sheets. Ollie Mae and Arthur didn’t sign up. So that meant I couldn’t either, but I wanted to. I really wanted to.

  Seven

  Christmas is here and instead of a snow-covered ground, the streets are one big ice-skating rink. Freezing rain fell all last night, so now icicles are hanging off of tree branches like crystals and all the houses on the block look like they are made of glass.

  The best part of today is watching Shirley, Jimmie, and Juanita play with the tea set. They are taking turns pouring pretend tea into the tiny plastic cups. Shirley is fussing at Jimmie and Juanita for drinking too fast. “It’s hot, you have to sip it,” she says.

  Ollie Mae got me a Singer sewing machine. It is just what I wanted. This way, I can practice sewing at home and not just at school. Mrs. Collins says I am a fast learner, that she wants me to help some of the other girls in class. I’ve been sewing all afternoon, practicing making pockets and handkerchiefs so I can work on getting the stitching perfectly straight. I can’t wait to tell Mrs. Collins that now, I’ll be even better at helping others in class.

  Ollie Mae comes into the living room and starts cleaning up all of the crumpled Christmas wrapping paper and empty boxes that were left behind from this morning’s gift opening. She looks over my shoulder, watches me sew for a bit. “My, you are good,” she says. “I couldn’t sew that well when I was your age.”

  “Really? How did you get so good at it, then?” I ask. Ollie Mae is the best at making quilts. Whenever a woman at the church has a baby, she makes a quilt for them. Sometimes people pay her to do it.

  “Practice,” Ollie Mae says. “The more you work at it, the better you get.”

  “Mrs. Collins says sewing is masterful because it means you can make something out of nothing.”

  “Hmm. I never thought of it like that. Just something I had to learn how to do,” Ollie Mae tells me. “Growing up, everyone did it. Sewing was a way to save money. We were self-sufficient.”

  “Did people sew their own clothes so they wouldn’t have to buy from white folk?”

  “Betty Dean, now you hush up all that talk. I told you that you are not joining that Housewives’ League. You are already too busy and—”

  “I wasn’t asking to join. I was just asking—”

  “Are you sassing me, child?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just explaining that—”

  “Sure sounds like you’re talking back,” Ollie Mae says.

  I don’t understand what I did wrong, what I said to get Ollie Mae so upset. I just keep sewing, stop trying to explain myself, stop talking. The needle stomps along the fabric, its steady thump thump thump the only sound in the room.

  Then Ollie Mae says, “I get you a sewing machine and all you want to do is talk about Mrs. Collins this and Mrs. Peck that, and Mrs. Malloy said this and that. Here I am cleaning up and you haven’t even offered to help, like I haven’t taught you good manners. Don’t you see all this paper on the floor, Betty Dean?”

  “But I didn’t make that mess. I already threw away my—”

  “Stop talking back. You hear?”

  Sometimes I forget that Ollie Mae’s questions aren’t meant to be answered.

  Arthur calls out from the kitchen, “You two stop all that fussing. It’s Christmas. Can we have some peace in this house?”

  I keep sewing, keep listening to the needle run and run. I think of running away, running away from Ollie Mae.

  I keep on sewing, keep on being masterful.

  I am almost finished with the handkerchief. I will get up and help Ollie Mae as soon as I’m done, even though the mess was made by Sonny, Henry, Shirley, and Jimmie. I don’t understand why she’s not fussing at any of them for not helping her clean. Why is she always picking on me?

  Ollie Mae comes over and orders me to stop sewing. “Get up and help me now, Betty Dean,” she says.

  I don’t tell her that I was about to get up, that I really want to help her. That I want to do whatever it takes so she is not mad at me. That I will do anything to make her like me the way she likes my sisters.

  As I help her clean up the living room, Ollie Mae tells me how ungrateful I am. That I am an ornery little girl. That I am like my daddy, bad to the core. I don’t say anything. And even though there is no more sound from the running needle, I still hear it in my heart and it hurts. I see myself running. Running so fast. Running away from her.

  Eight

  Tonight, I am not asking God anything.

  Tonight, I am listening to the rain fall, listening to the wind whistle, to Shirley’s breaths and Jimmie’s snores, to Juanita’s tossing and turning, and to the tick tick tick of the clock.

  I am listening for
Aunt Fannie Mae’s laugh and Grandma Matilda’s singing and the creak of the swing in the backyard that swayed under my favorite tree.

  I am listening. No questions tonight.

  Just listening and waiting and hoping that if I keep quiet for once, maybe God will speak to me.

  Nine

  The ice has melted, and still no snow. Arthur can’t stop complaining because every winter he takes Sonny and Henry outside to sled down the driveway. There hasn’t been enough snow for them to sled even once.

  It’s the last Saturday of 1945. In three days, it will be a new year and Ollie Mae will take the Christmas tree down and we’ll all share our New Year’s resolutions and Arthur will lead us in prayer, like he does every year. Shirley, Jimmie, and I are in the living room talking about what our resolutions are going to be. Shirley and Jimmie are spread across the rug on the living room floor, lying on their bellies, coloring, their crayons scattered around them. I am sitting at my sewing table.

  Shirley says, “Maybe this year I will learn one hundred scriptures by heart.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jimmie says.

  “Is not,” Shirley yells. She looks at me, asking me to take her side.

  “It’s not impossible, Jimmie. Just challenging.”

  “See,” Shirley says.

  The phone rings and Arthur answers it. As soon as I hear him say, “Well, hello, Suesetta,” I get up and go into the kitchen. “It’s for you,” he tells me.

  Suesetta is calling to ask if I can come over. When I ask Ollie Mae, she says, “I don’t mind, but these dishes need to be washed first.”

  I tell Suesetta I’ll be over soon.

  When I hang up the phone, Ollie Mae says, “I’m going to the market.”

  “Okay,” I say. I stand in front of the sink and look at all of the dishes that I have to wash. With all of us here for lunch today, it looks like every dish in our house is in the sink—pots and pans, plates, bowls, glasses, silverware.

  I know that Suesetta is waiting for me and there’s no telling how long it will take for all of these dishes to get washed, dried, and put away. I go back into the living room to find Shirley. I am very careful about how I word my question. “Shirley, the dishes need to be washed. Can you do them?”