I had heard about the American Negro Theatre from Stanley Ford, one of the boys who met with Mother’s approval and who often came to call on Sunday afternoons when we girls were allowed to have company. His sister, Ruth, was a member of the group and knew of plans to mount the first production, a new comedy by Abram Hill called On Strivers Row. She told Stanley, who suggested that I audition for Cobina, the debutante and leading love interest. Mother and Daddy thought it was a good idea, so I took a chance.2
That chance turned into a stunning seventy-five-year-long, award-winning career.
Ruby performed her one-woman show, My One Good Nerve, at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in 2000. After one performance, I met her backstage, introducing myself as Stan Ford’s son and Ruth Ford’s nephew. Ruby wagged her finger at me, then spoke in her trademark husky, breathless voice.
“Why’d you wait until after my performance to come backstage and say ‘hi’? You know I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your father, and for Ruth.”
I told her my father had passed away a month earlier, but with others now waiting in line to greet her, we said little else. She squeezed my arm as I left.
Years later, I met Ruby again, this time around a table in the living room of Morgan Freeman’s palatial estate in Charleston, Mississippi. Myrna Colley-Lee, then Morgan’s wife, had recently started the SonEdna Foundation to bring the performing and literary arts to the Mississippi Delta. Myrna invited me to be a founding board member. Hasna Muhammad, Ruby and Ossie’s daughter, also sat on the board. Ruby signed on as a foundation adviser. Among the many other luminary Black film and stage figures sitting around that table were Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon on Sesame Street; playwright Ifa Bayeza; critic and scholar Karen Baxter; and Pamela Poitier, Sidney’s daughter.
I spent the weekend with Ruby, and at one point she pulled me aside. With the same wistfulness I’d seen in my father, she said, “Stan would pick me up from my house, and we’d take the subway to Central Park. We’d get a rowboat, and he’d row me around the lake for hours. We’d talk and all, then he’d bring me back.” She let go with a lusty laugh.
Writing to her friend Carlotta, a young Ruby recalled a vacation spent with my father and his family on Long Island: “Did you get my card from Nassau where I spent a whoopin’ good time with Stanley under the guard and guidance of his whole family?”3
But then a Shakespearean tragicomedy unfolded in which my father’s desire to marry Ruby was thwarted by his sister’s untimely love affair and a chance encounter with my mother.
My aunt Ruth graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College in New York City in 1931, and after graduation she fell in love with a man whom she was determined to marry. My grandfather, who would have no such fate befall his brilliant young daughter, reckoned her lovesickness an insanity and committed her to Rockland State Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill. After suffering through rounds of electroshock therapy and high doses of antipsychotic medication, Ruth actually did become mentally ill and remained in Rockland State Hospital for most of her life.
In the early 1940s, mental illness stigmatized a family, predisposing all members and their offspring, the reasoning went, to a similar condition. Even if children refused to accept this diagnosis, parents often stepped in to seal their children’s fate. Whether my grandparents, or Ruby’s parents, objected to the union, or whether my father was simply embarrassed by his sister’s plight, I do not know. But he never married Ruby. She went on to marry the blues singer Frankie Dee Brown in 1941, divorced him in 1945, and then married a dashing young actor named Ossie Davis, with whom she remained for the rest of her life.
My father first saw my mother on a subway heading into Manhattan from the Bronx, while he rode to his job at IBM and she to school at Hunter College, where both Ruth and Ruby had also graduated. Though they lived just around the corner from each other, my parents had not met before. My father came home to say he’d just seen his next girlfriend. My mother, determined to finish her degree, came home to say she’d seen a man on the subway whose stare frightened her to death. Apparently, she got over my father’s stare, and he found someone new to row around the Central Park lake.
My father then told of riding a double-decker bus with my mother. Just at the moment he leaned in to ask for another date, the bus hit a bump, obscuring the end of his sentence, which began “Will you . . .” When my mother replied, “Yes, I will marry you,” he felt duty bound to comply. My mother told a similar story, only, in her telling, it happened on the subway, when the train’s wheels screeched around a curve, obliterating my father’s words. At any rate, they married on December 23, 1950, two years after Ruby married Ossie Davis.
Now on life’s stage are two wedded couples with a mélange of emotions between them. My father never got over Ruby. What Ruby felt for my father I can only infer from what she wrote in her autobiography. My mother remained cool to Ruby, as did Ossie toward my father. In their joint autobiography, Ruby and Ossie both freely admit to having an open relationship in the early part of their marriage:
It occurred to us, from observation and from reasoning, that extramarital sex was not what really destroyed marriages, but rather the lies and deception that invariably accompanied it—that was the culprit. So we decided to give ourselves permission to sleep with other partners if we wished—as long as what we did was honest as well as private and that neither of us exposed the family to scandal or disease.4
This period did not last long, but Ruby also wrote of Ossie’s later bringing up my father in a fight that erupted between them. Ossie asked her if she wanted a divorce and said, “You know what? Maybe you should have married Stanley.”
To which Ruby replied indignantly, “What made you bring up Stanley? I never loved Stanley, and you know it. What’s Stanley got to do with you and me?”5
When I asked my father for more insight into his relationship with Ruby, he told me he would take those details to his grave. When I asked Ruby, she simply let go an alluring, husky laugh. Throughout his life, my father periodically visited Ruby at her New Rochelle home.
An arranged marriage is the best way to understand my parents’ relationship, but it was not arranged in the traditional sense of two families brokering a deal regarding their children. My father’s marriage proposal, while comedic if not bordering on the absurd, came at a time when both he and my mother felt the pressure of prevailing social customs and conventions, especially for upwardly mobile Blacks.
My mother was the first in her family to advance beyond high school. She received her master’s in education from Hunter. She spoke fluent German and Spanish and ultimately received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, after time at Heidelberg University, for a thesis on the relationship between music, reading, and mathematics. My father graduated from City College, and not to be outdone by my mother, he got his master’s in business administration from New York University while working at IBM. Both my parents were uncommon, highly educated, intelligent people, though not immune to common human temptations.
During the early years of their marriage, each of them had paramours. My mother blamed her dalliances on the lack of attention she received from my father. My father blamed this lack of attention on his need to work twice as hard as a White man to maintain his position at IBM, while fighting off the attempts of managers and coworkers to engineer his failure. I believe they both suffered from AMS (arranged marriage syndrome), characterized by love that grows based on mutual respect, admiration, and shared support of each other’s life goals, yet lacks an essential passionate spark.
“It surprised me how inexperienced your mother was.” My father grinned, winked, nodded. “Know what I mean?” He winked again.
But my mother told my sister, “Men expected to marry virgins. . . . And, oh, by the way, I simply faked it. Your father never knew the difference!”
Deceit and deception characterized their relationship from the very start.
&nbs
p; Williamsbridge, where my parents grew up and where they lived when first married, is not far from Pelham Bay Park, which is home to Orchard Beach, otherwise known as the Bronx Riviera. The mile-long, U-shaped Orchard Beach began as a marvelous illusion, created in the 1930s by dumping garbage, politely called landfill, to connect several islands off the Bronx coast to the mainland, and trucking in millions of cubic yards of sand from New Jersey and Queens. A majestic, curved pavilion housing thousands of lockers stood just before the faux beach.
As children, my sister and I often spent summer evenings at Orchard Beach with our mother, sometimes in the company of men clearly not our father. It surprised me, then, when one such humid summer evening my father showed up at the beach, having left IBM early, briefcase in hand, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, tie loosened, and shirt collar opened. A determined gaze set into his eyes. My sister and I licked the last of our ice cream sundaes from our spoons. Leonard Williams, who went by the name of Lonnie, a deacon at Trinity Baptist Church who shared our blanket, dropped his sundae as my father marched over. My mother, head down, licked an empty spoon.
My father threw down his briefcase in the sand before Lonnie, as though he were a knight laying down a gauntlet before another knight. Then both men faced off as if vying for the hand of a waiting dark queen. At seven years old, I could not fully comprehend the words that flew between them. I remember only that those words had something to do with my mother. Their heated argument grew to the point where I remember thinking, Oh, no, this is going to become a fistfight. Finally, Lonnie returned for a towel he had left on the blanket, before disappearing into the darkness that was then descending. My father stormed off to our car, informing my mother in no uncertain terms that it was time to go. Lonnie never went to Orchard Beach with us again.
On the other hand, a visit from Lena Rogers always seemed to set my mother in a tizzy. Drinking buddies? Smoking partners? Lovers? Whatever the relationship between my father and Lena, my mother disliked her, even as my father welcomed “Cousin Lena” into our home. As a boy, I found Lena repulsive yet titillating. Whenever we met, she snuggled me between her breasts, holding me so tight I could hardly breathe. Her skin smelled of cigarette smoke and a cloying perfume. A whiff of alcohol floated on her breath. She had never married and had no children. I found it hard to believe that she worked only as a secretary during the day, when my father often visited her studio apartment at night.
My father told me that at one point he hired a private investigator to track my mother’s infidelities, which ultimately led to a family friend who went by Chick instead of his real name. Even at ten years old, I could have saved my father the expense and effort. I already knew that my mother and Chick had something going on behind his back.
An engineer’s mind, while made for computers and chess, is easily confounded by the irregularities of ordinary life. The simple fact of my father’s precise daily routine in walking to a particular subway station on his way to IBM meant that he missed the obvious signs of my mother’s affair with Chick. One express and two local elevated stations on the Pelham Bay line served our home along Hutchinson River Parkway. Every morning, my father walked to the station at Pelham Bay Park, at the end of the #6 line, for a guaranteed express ride and a seat on a commuter subway, which would soon be filled to overflowing as it headed into Manhattan. But the express passed by two local stations at Buhre Avenue and Middletown Road.
On my way to junior high school each morning, I had a choice: walk to the Pelham Bay Park train station and there catch a city bus to school, or ride the local train a few stations south and board a different city bus. Depending on the time, the subway-bus combination could be faster. Walking to the Buhre Avenue station presented more interesting options for meandering through neighborhood streets. For a straight shot to the subway, I walked to the Middletown Road station six blocks away. But walking to Middletown Road meant passing by the Hutchinson-Whitestone Motel.
A small, redbrick structure, dwarfed by surrounding apartment buildings and the elevated train superstructure behind it on Westchester Avenue, the Hutchinson-Whitestone Motel only accepts cash and offers themed rooms for use by the hour. When I walked by, I’d often find a pale blue late-model Cadillac with an elongated, slender body and rear fins parked in the motel’s lot—a car with Virginia license plates that I knew well because I’d ridden in it more than once in New York City and in Newport News.
Chick was a man of short stature bearing an outsize name, driving an oversize car, and telling outlandish tales of flying P-51 Mustangs in the Army Air Corps. “Napoleonic complex” comes to mind when thinking of Chick, whose real name was Saint George Bruce Daye. Chick had parked his car in front of a dive where he’d rented a room, six blocks away from our apartment building. He hadn’t come to visit my sister or me. He certainly hadn’t come to visit my father. So even a child could put it together: Chick had come to visit my mother.
On the other hand, my father would occasionally appear at home with red lipstick stains that stood out against the white collar of his starched shirt. My mother would exclaim with glee that those stains told of my father’s unfaithfulness.
This seesaw drama of deception and deceit teeter-tottered through our home. When my father vented his frustrations, fueled by disempowerment at work and dissatisfaction at home, my mother did not back down. Our home became a hotbed of conflict with few exceptions. My father did appreciate my mother’s physical beauty. Periodically, he’d return from work with a gorgeous dress that fit her perfectly, a sparkling jeweled necklace or bracelet, or a dazzling pair of earrings. Often these amazing gifts were tied to a raise or a minor promotion he’d received from IBM.
As classically trained pianists and vocalists, my parents performed flawlessly together. They shined under a spotlight of public adoration at IBM functions and elsewhere. Out of the public’s eye, my parents fought bitterly, two distraught divas whose lives collided more often than not. The intensity of their verbal, emotional, and intellectual battles I struggled to equate with love. I disliked the constant carping and prolonged bickering. Even as a child of nine or ten, I suggested more than once that they’d be better off apart than together. That suggestion brought an instant, unanimous rebuke: “We’re staying together for you and your sister.” They believed we were better off with two parents, even if those parents displayed such obvious animosity toward each other—until even that belief broke down.
In 1962, my mother flew to El Paso and walked across the border to Juárez for a quickie, as Mexican divorces were then called. She flew back the next day with the decree. My father fretted that the divorce filings depicted him as a “homo.” He moved out of our apartment and into his own in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan. After twice divorcing my father and engaging in a number of other relationships, my mother confirmed my long-held suspicions by finally marrying Chick and staying with him until the end of her life.
My father no longer lived with us, but I had a regular routine with him: bowling every Saturday morning and dinner at his apartment every other Tuesday evening. Bowling, like chess, brought out his competitive streak. He kept score meticulously and thoroughly enjoyed trouncing me, which I endured mainly because I got to spend time with him. But visiting his apartment on 83rd Street brought forth a side of him I had not seen before: a bachelor with a nice place in a great part of the city.
One Tuesday evening, while he made dinner, I sat in his living room carefully examining a glass ashtray from his coffee table. I held it up to the light, looking for fingerprints. I set it back down gently, then plucked two crushed cigarette butts from the ash. Both had ruby red lip marks. I held them closer. The lipstick appeared to be the same.
My father stepped from his small kitchen with two plates of hamburgers, mashed potatoes, and peas. He set the plates down next to the ashtray. I held up a butt in front of me as though offering it to him.
“Who smoked these?”
“A friend.”
“Do
I know her?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious.”
“You’re too young.”
“Too young for what?”
“Too young to ask, or to handle the answer.”
“Try me.”
My father smirked. “It’s an answer I’ll have to take with me to my grave.”
“Why?”
He said nothing more on the topic.
When we finished our meals, he scooped up our dishes. Before disappearing into his kitchen, he turned back. “Set up the chess board for a game.”
I reached next to the couch for the wooden box that held the black and white pieces, and then turned back to pinch a crushed butt between two fingers and lift it to my nose. I could have sworn I sniffed a vague aroma of alcohol mixed with a cloying perfume, and that brought about sensations of being snuggled between “Cousin Lena’s” breasts.
* * *
The summer before my parents’ first divorce, we drove out to the IBM Country Club. Already a fractured family by then, our seven-by-seven-foot dark gray woolen beach blanket seemed far too small to contain us all. My parents sat at opposite corners with their feet in the sand, my father with his back to us. He scanned the White faces that passed by. Whenever he saw someone he knew, he leaped up.
“Let me introduce you to my family.”
My mother rose, extending her hand, smiling. “Pleased to meet you. . . . Let me introduce you to our children.”
My sister and I dutifully popped up, also smiling, representatives of “our race,” though we did not know it then, for the last time at the IBM Country Club in Sands Point.
We did not go to another IBM Christmas party, though that did not lessen the tension of the holidays. Christmas became a war zone of presents, with my parents vying to see who could purchase the most. My mother would drive us to our father’s apartment, where we would pack the back seat with so many wrapped gifts that she had trouble seeing out the rearview mirror. Then, once home, my mother would bring out her own pile of presents from a closet. Claudia and I would create stacks of presents side by side, each stack reaching toward the ceiling and dwarfing the Christmas tree. This yuletide warfare played out each year during their divorce. But what first seemed like a bonanza soon became a recognition for both Claudia and me that Christmas was not about us. Christmas was about our parents, who used presents to fight a proxy war and wanted us to believe those presents were proxies for their love. What my parents really taught me is that love cannot be purchased or wrapped in glittering paper, tied with ribbons, and adorned with bows.
Think Black Page 12