After we had our first baby in 1943, we moved across the street to a one-room kitchenette that cost six dollars a week. We had a sink, bed, dresser, stove, and a little icebox that the guy came around and put ice in once a week. All our furniture was stuff we’d found or we bought from Woolworth and could be folded: folding chairs, folding tables. Our window faced an alley and the brick wall of the next building and it was so close to the adjoining building you couldn’t tell whether it was raining or snowing outside. You had to stick your head out the window to see what the weather was. The bathroom was in the hallway and used by all the tenants and there were roaches everywhere. No matter how many you killed, they kept coming back. I kept my church hat on a shelf in a hatbox, and every Sunday when I’d pick it up to take my hat out, roaches would crawl out. We had four kids in that one room. We used the dresser drawers as cribs and the kids slept with us or on fold-out cots. We lived in that one room for nine years, and those nine years were the happiest years of my life.
I met an interesting white woman during that time, my friend Lily. I saw her in the park on 127th one day while I had my kids out and she had her two kids with her. She was white and her children looked like mine, so we started talking. She was Jewish, from Florida. Her family was rich and she was very refined—Lily was into books and opera—and we had black husbands, so we had that in common. Lily’s husband was West Indian, and they were members of the Communist Youth Movement. Back then that was like—boom!—trouble, maybe the government was looking out on them or something. Me and Dennis weren’t for communism. We were for Jesus Christ. Lily and I were friends for a long time till she moved away to California. Her husband left her for a younger woman—she was too good for him anyway. He chased around anything in a skirt, in fact chased me around when she wasn’t looking but I wouldn’t have it. She became a Hare Krishna or one of those wild religions and later she got married again, this time to a white man. I was supposed to go visit her back in the seventies, but just before I did she wrote me a nasty letter saying don’t come, and a lot of other mean, insulting things, so I called my trip off and never heard from her again. I don’t know why she did that. I think she might have had some problems with her children. That might have been at the bottom of it, because over the years we wrote and I always talked about mine. But her kids had some problems.
Our family grew so fast, before I knew it me and Dennis and four kids were cramped in that one room. So we applied to get an apartment in the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn. They put us on a long waiting list and said, “Don’t expect much,” because to get in there was a political thing, but God made a way for us and we got in there in 1950. They gave us a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of 795 Hicks Street with a bathroom. That was the greatest part about it. To have your own bathroom. The floors and walls were pure cement. The kids would get scuffs and big bruises from falling on it, and the glasses and plates had to be replaced with plastic ones because once you dropped them they smashed. But Red Hook was beautiful in those days. It was integrated—Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and blacks. There was grass on the center mall, and a playground with slides and monkey bars. It was a real American life, the life I’d always dreamed of. I’d kiss Dennis in the mornings when he left for work, and when he came home in the evening I’d stand by the window and watch him turn the corner and walk down the center mall. I remember him clearly—his walk, his white shirt, his shoes. The kids would run down to meet him and wrap around his legs like puppies. He would bring groceries from the A&P and a surprise for the kids—a cupcake from his lunch or chewing gum. I loved that man. I never missed home or my family after I got married. My soul was full.
We went to Metropolitan for a couple of years after moving to Red Hook, but Rev. Brown had died of a sudden heart attack and it became too much to ride the subway all the way up to Harlem every Sunday with all the kids. Plus Dennis had gotten the calling to preach and said he wanted to start a church. He quit drinking beer and enrolled at the Shelton Bible College and got his divinity degree from there in 1953. Then we went out and invited our neighbors from Red Hook to come to prayer meeting at our house on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Mrs. Ingram, and your godparents the McNairs, the Floods, the Taylors, they were the first ones to come. I’d clear off the table and put a white tablecloth on it and that would be Dennis’s pulpit. After that got going good he said he needed to find a church. I said, “How can we afford a church?” With his little salary, we could barely afford to feed our kids—we had gone from four kids to five to six to seven. I mean, after a while they just dropped like eggs and we loved having them, but I couldn’t see how we could afford a church with all these kids. Your sister Helen, I didn’t have one prenatal visit to a clinic or anything when I had her. I just walked into the hospital and dropped her like an egg and went home. How we fed them, well, it was meal to meal. I shopped at Goodwill for their clothes and for their Christmas gifts, and I’d walk them around and let them play outside. I’d keep two in a stroller and two next to me, and the rest, I just kept them close. God just provided somehow.
Dennis kept poking around till he found an empty building that was cheap near Red Hook. The white man who owned it didn’t want to rent it to blacks so I went over there and signed the lease by myself and when the man saw me and your father and your godfather walking in there the next day carrying paint cans and tools to fix it up with he wanted his building back, but it was too late. We named it New Brown Memorial, after Rev. Brown. The new members kept it going strong, and after we got about sixty people together regularly we moved to a building at 195 Richards Street that had heat, because Dennis was constantly toting heaters around in that other building, which was freezing. Our church survived real well until early 1957, when Dennis came home from work with a bad cold. He was so hoarse I made him lie down and rest. He was hoarse in bed about three weeks.
He smoked cigarettes, filterless Lucky Strikes, and he got hoarse from time to time from preaching and the church not having good heat, and plus it was January and cold outside, so I thought nothing of it. But he got so he couldn’t get up out of bed and wouldn’t eat and ran a fever, so I took him to St. Peter’s Hospital. There were a lot of stares in the hospital when we went in there, stares and questions from the doctors and nurses and such, asking, “Who’s that?” and, “Are you his wife?” and all this, but I ignored them. I just wanted Dennis to get out and come home because the kids and I missed him. Our entire world revolved around him. The kids would sit and meditate just like him, then brag to each other how they would show him their meditation when he got home. Your sister Rosetta wouldn’t let anyone sit in his chair while he was in the hospital, not even me. No one was allowed to.
He seemed to get seriously ill very quickly. One day he was walking around, the next he was hoarse and laid up in the hospital. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. Something in his lungs, this one said. Something in his pancreas, the other one said. They put me off when I’d ask. They’d talk about him in a general way to me, then they’d go in the hallway and point at me with their chins and make remarks about me and Dennis which they thought I couldn’t hear. I could hear them but I ignored them. I was focused on my husband. Every day when I’d walk home from the hospital, my friend Lillian would stick her head out her window in the projects and ask, “How’s Reverend McBride?” I’d say, “He didn’t eat today.” She’d say, “Well, he’s got to get worse before he gets better.” Then one day when I passed by her window I was smiling and happy to tell Lillian, “He ate a grapefruit today,” and she said, “See, I told you. He’s got to get worse before he gets better.” But he didn’t get better. He got worse and worse, and during this time I missed my period. I had seven kids, and I had no time to think about my period. I thought it was stress because Dennis was in the hospital longer than I wanted him to be, but when I told him about it, he said, “If it’s a boy, we’ll call him James after my Uncle Jim.” And that’s how you got named. See, I didn’t th
ink he was going to die. I had no idea, but he knew, because he named you, and he’d make remarks like, “I know the Lord Jesus Christ will take care y’all should anything happen to me. Don’t worry, Ruth. Just trust in God.” I wouldn’t hear of such talk and would make him stop it.
Sometimes in the hospital I would go into the hallway and cry so Dennis wouldn’t see me, and one night I was standing out there crying and these two white doctors came by and said, “Who are you?” because it was past normal visiting hours. I pointed to Dennis’s room and said, “My husband is in there,” and they just got so cold and disgusted. They talked about me right in front of my face and walked away.
One afternoon after Dennis had been in there a few weeks, I went to see him and he was getting thin now from not eating, and he said, “Why don’t you bring the kids by to see me?” I said, “We shouldn’t do that,” because they had school, plus they didn’t let kids come inside the hospital and I couldn’t drag seven kids up there. I really didn’t want them to see him ill like that—the oldest of them was thirteen—but they really wanted to see him too, so I said, “Okay. I’ll bring them by the window and you can come see them from the window.” He was on the second floor. So I went home and got all the kids and brought them down to the hospital and they stood on the street and yelled up for him, “Daddy! Daddy!” and Dennis came to the window in his bathrobe and looked down at them and waved to them, and from the expression on his face, him standing there waving at the children, who were so excited to see him, I got a horrible feeling in my heart. I told myself, “Lord, he won’t die, will he? He’s my husband. He’s my dream. He won’t die now, will he, Lord?” I had no idea what to do. It just seemed like it wasn’t going to happen. I went home and prayed to the Lord not to take my husband.
And then a few days later he died.
Lord…he just died.
I was home and I got a call from a doctor at the hospital about six in the morning. He asked if I was Mrs. McBride. I said I was. He said, “Mr. McBride just passed away.” I said, “That’s impossible. He wasn’t that sick.” The doctor said, “He had cancer,” and hung up. That’s the first time they told me he had cancer. That’s the first I ever heard of it. I stood there and looked out the window over the projects. It was April 5, 1957, I remember it to the day. It was just getting to be the break of day. I looked out there, and there was a blackness that came over me. A sinking feeling like I was going right down into blackness. The children woke up and they were huddled together crying and I started to cry. Part of me died when Dennis died. I loved that man more than life itself and at times I wished the good Lord would have taken me instead of him, because he was a much better person for living than me. He just had so much more to give the world than me. He brought me new life. He revived me after I left my family, brought me to Jesus, opened my eyes to a new world, then passed on himself. Lord, it was hard. Very hard to let him go. I was angry at him for dying for a while afterwards, angry that he left me with all those kids, but more than that, I missed him.
We buried him down in High Point, North Carolina. I was in shock a lot of the time, really, and it was your Aunt Candis and your sister Jack who got me and the kids together for the funeral in Brooklyn and then to North Carolina for the funeral down there. It was the first and last time I ever went south with him. I couldn’t leave his side after the funeral in Brooklyn and would have ridden with his body in the back of the train if they let me, but they didn’t, but I sat on that train and said to myself, “I’m gonna take him home. I will take him home to see him buried,” and no white man nor black man would have stopped me from doing it and I swear before God Almighty, had anyone stood before me to prevent me from doing it I would have struck them down. When we got to the train station in High Point, Dennis’s Uncle Jim went to claim the body at the counter and I went with him, and the white man at the counter said, “Who’s this body for?” I said, “It’s for me,” and he kept looking at me and Uncle Jim, and he asked us again, “Who’s this body for?” and Uncle Jim tried to say the body was with him, so as not to make trouble with that white man, but I told Uncle Jim, “No, Uncle Jim. That is my husband there.” I told that man, “That is my husband and I’ve come here to bury him and he is with me.” It caused a little commotion but he gave us no trouble and signed it over to me and Uncle Jim and we buried Dennis in the Burns Hill Cemetery. I was thirty-six then and had been with Dennis nearly sixteen years and I’d never functioned without him. I remember walking through the projects with my seven kids, crying—I’d just break out in tears in the middle of the day sometimes—and your sister Helen, she was about nine years old then, she said, “Don’t cry, Ma. Daddy’s up in heaven,” and it just made me cry more. It was a hard, hard time.
When we came back to New York after burying Dennis, I opened up our mailbox and found it full of checks and money orders and cash in envelopes from people in the projects who knew us, and people from Metropolitan Church in Harlem. Dozens of letters with checks and money in them. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. Folks sent us oranges and apples and chickens and turkeys and clothes and if someone had anything extra, they just gave it to us. The people at his job, McCoy Publishing, the white people, they sent us money. Your sister Jack and Aunt Candis, who came up from North Carolina to stay with us, and your godparents the McNairs, and the Ingrams, and my old friend Irene Johnson, they all pitched in, but even with their help we struggled.
I was so desperate I went back to my Jewish family to ask for help. I looked up my Aunt Betts who had gotten married to a rich man and was living in a fancy building on the East Side in Manhattan with a doorman. I had to talk my way past the doorman to get inside. When I knocked on the door of her apartment, Aunt Betts opened the door, saw who I was, and slammed the door in my face. I left there and cried openly on the sidewalk. Then I called my sister Gladys, who was living in Queens. “You promised you wouldn’t leave,” she said. I told her I was sorry. But she wasn’t really pleased to hear from me. “Call me tomorrow,” she said, but when I called the next day her husband picked up the phone and said, “She doesn’t want to speak to you. Don’t ever call here again,” and he hung up on me. See, they were done with me. When Jews say kaddish, they’re not responsible for you anymore. You’re dead to them. Saying kaddish and sitting shiva, that absolves them of any responsibility for you. I was on my own then, but I wasn’t alone, because like Dennis said, God the Father watched over me, and sent me your stepfather, who took over and he saved us and did many, many things for us. He wasn’t a minister like Dennis. He was different, a workingman who had never been late for work in the thirty years that he worked for the New York City Housing Authority, and he was a good, good man. I met him after you were born and after a while he asked me to marry him, and Aunt Candis said, “Marry that man, Ruth. Marry him!” and she’d clean the house spotless and cook up these splendid meals when your stepfather came by, to make me look good. He thought I was making up those tasty yams and pork chops and I can’t cook to save my life. When I told him the truth, he said it didn’t matter, that he wanted to marry me anyway, even though his brothers thought he was crazy. I had eight children! But I wasn’t ready to marry. I turned him down three times. I took you down to North Carolina to show you to Dennis’s parents, Etta and Nash, in late ‘57—they only lasted four or five years after their only child died—and when I told Grandma Etta I was thinking of marrying again, she said, “God bless you, Ruth, because you’re our daughter now. Marry that man.” That’s how black folks thought back then. That’s why I never veered from the black side. I would have never even thought of marrying a white man. When I told your stepfather about how my sister and Aunt Betts treated me, he spoke about them without bitterness or hate. “You don’t need them to help you,” he said. “I’ll help you for the rest of my life if you’ll marry me,” which I did, and God bless him, he was as good as his word.
24.
New Brown
“Come to God! God’s in the blessing busi
ness!”
It’s the October 1994, fortieth-anniversary gala of the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, and a deacon stands before the audience to muster them up for prayer. Though New Brown is located in Brooklyn, the sixty parishioners are gathered in this tiny banquet room at the Ramada Hotel at La Guardia Airport in Queens because somebody knew one of the hotel cooks and they gave the church a discount. It isn’t the Plaza Hotel four-star service, but it will do. The room is dank, dark, and cold. The meat is lousy, the waiters busy. Somebody came up with the idea of hiring a gospel band with a keyboard player, who wears shades and plays too loud, but no one’s complaining. This is a celebratory night and the parishioners are dressed in their best. For forty years New Brown, located in the Red Hook Housing Projects, one of the largest and most neglected housing projects in New York City, has stood strong. For forty years the parishioners have struggled. For forty years they have persevered and spread God’s word. This is Mommy’s home church. This is the church where I got married. This is the church my father Andrew McBride built.
The Color of Water Page 18