The Complete Works of Pat Parker

by Pat Parker

he lay down

  in the presence of his wife

  and children

  and died.

  Her father too was a slave

  common law wed to an indian squaw

  Addie came colored caramel

  long black hair

  high cheek bones.

  She was a christian woman

  her religion a daily occurrence

  her allegiance was to God,

  her husband, her children

  in that order

  together she and George

  had twenty-two children

  many never survived

  the first year of life

  a fact not unusual

  for the time.

  When she was seventy-six

  George died

  she began to travel

  to the homes of her children

  to make sure they led

  a christian life

  the children hid

  their beer and bourbon

  the grandchildren hid

  she would come for two months

  then move on

  leave the words of Jehovah

  sweating from the walls

  when she was ninety-four years old

  she lay down

  and died.

  II

  Ernest and Marie

  He came from the earth, they say,

  an expression meaning orphan

  parents in the hands of poverty

  best give the boy away

  and so he came to live

  in a good christian home

  with a good christian minister

  and his wife

  he was a man of many trades

  roofer in the summer

  tire retreader in the winter

  earned far beyond

  his four years of education

  he wanted to see

  all of his children

  get educated

  he lived long enough to see

  his children gone and grown

  and then

  he lay low

  and died.

  She was the youngest of the twenty-two

  quiet woman

  tall for her time

  she bore eight children

  five survived the early years

  she raised them in a christian way

  by day she cleaned houses

  by night she cleaned her own

  she was sixty-two when her husband died

  took her first plane trip that same year

  when her third daughter was killed

  she cremated her child and went home

  willed herself sick and weary

  she took three years to complete the task

  then she lay down

  and died.

  III

  It is from this past that I come

  surrounded by sisters in blood

  and spirit

  it is this past

  that I bequeath

  a history of work and struggle.

  Each generation improves the world

  for the next.

  My grandparents willed me strength.

  My parents willed me pride.

  I will to you rage.

  I give you a world incomplete

  a world where

  women still

  are property and chattel

  where

  color still

  shuts doors

  where

  sexual choice still

  threatens

  but I give you

  a legacy

  of doers

  of people who take risks

  to chisel the crack wider.

  Take the strength that you may

  wage a long battle.

  Take the pride that you can

  never stand small.

  Take the rage that you can

  never settle for less.

  These be the things I pass

  to you my daughter

  if this is the result of perversion

  let the world stand screaming.

  You will mute their voices

  with your life.

  Prose

  The Demonstrator

  Hey, man, what’s happening? Have you made the scene yet? . . .What scene! . . .Like man ain’t you hip to the battle? Ain’t nobody told you about the great war that we are now waging against our white oppressors? Civil rights, man. That’s what’s happening, man. Like, dig, haven’t you read the press on the scene in Torrance?* Yea, man, like we really upset the cats out there, man. You dig? I mean, they really lost their cool. . .What do you mean jail? Sure, if you go all the way and actually sit-in, the devils gonna bust you, but, like, CORE pays the bail and you’re back on the streets in no time at all . . .What you way? . . . Mess up your job. Naw, man, this ain’t like going to jail for a crime. Check this, man. There’s this chick councilwoman who’s trying to set things up real nice. She’s trying to fix it so if you get busted behind civil rights jazz, you can still gig for the county, city, and so on. You dig? Civil service gigs for civil rights demonstrators. Heh, heh. School? Naw, man, you won’t miss no time out of school. You go down on a Saturday and get busted, and CORE got you out early Sunday morning. So, Monday you make it to class and then the next weekend you ready to go down again. Hey and dig this man. You meet a lot of real cute chicks on this scene. A lotta little liberal broads who jest dying to listen to you trap to them about how bad you feel being deprived and all. Real nice broads, man. Yea. . . real nice . . . What? . . . Don’t I care about the cause? Yea, man, I really dig the cause. I don’t dig this separate housing, and schools and this jazz, man. No man, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the cause. I’m a stone in-te-gra-tion-ist. Yea, man, you dig. Check this, man. Those CORE cats give some boss gigs, man. They know how to get their aid. Yes . . . those cats know what’s happening. So you coming down this week-end and protest with us ain’t you, man? No! What you mean, man! What’s the matter with you, man? Don’t you believe in civil rights, man?

  Like, you square, man?

  *A town in California where demonstrations against housing bias have been staged.

  “The Demonstrator,” first appeared in Negro Digest in 1963.

  Autobiography Chapter One

  I’m not really sure how everything happened. I mean, I started out trying to be a good kid. I really wanted my folks to like me, understand? I sure had no idea how things were going to turn out. Maybe, had I known, I could have changed something somewhere. That’ s not to say I’m not a good person or anything. It’s just, I do have a few quirks that not too many people can relate to, except for people like me who have the same quirks. I mean, no one starts out trying to be the family queer, but somebody’s got to be. Or at least the white sheep. Black folks don’t care too much for that “black sheep” business.

  For a while there, it looked pretty cool for me but then my family informed me that I had to get an education. Now I have nothing against education but the people you have to get it from, Lord Jesus. Pardon the expression, but my folks were really religious and there are a few habits left from those days.

  Anyway, I had to go to school and I just wasn’t ready. I mean, right off in nursery school, I go, and here’s this woman- a white woman at that- with a big smile on her face talking about “Now children, we must form a line and get our shots, so we don’t get sick.” I mean, are you ready? No one said anything to me about no needles. And the needles! I mean, I know Texas has a reputation for doing things on a giant scale, but my lord! The damn needle was longer than my arm. And that “we” crap didn’t set me right either.

  There wasn’t much I could do about the first day but yell a lot and I did a good job of that and not without reason. Like for instance, the nurse was having one hell of a time locating our veins for the blood test. I guess she hadn’t had much practice with Black kids before. And after somebody jabs you three times in the wrong place and hands you a jive smile a
nd “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear,” well any sane person doesn’t want to deal with that nonsense. So right then I formulated my plan.

  They used to walk through the projects where we lived and pick up each kid and we’d fall in line behind each other and march off to school. Now by the time they got to our place there was a pretty long line, and the nursery school must have had some sort of rigid schedule about starting time because they didn’t waste much time waiting on any one kid. So when my mother fixed my lunch, I’d hide it. And the line would show up and there I’d be without a lunch. Well for sure, my mother wasn’t going to send her baby child off to school without a lunch and the nursery school woman wasn’t gonna wait while she fixed me another one. So I couldn’t go to school that day.

  Sometimes for diversity, I would crawl underneath my mother’s bed and eat my lunch right then and there. You know how some morning you wake up with a ferocious hunger? I stopped that. One morning I was under the bed, scarfing away, and I got careless and let an apple roll out. And my mother definitely didn’t think it was cute.

  Once in a while I would use some of the old standards that other kids use like a stomach ache. But I did try to display some creativity in my schemes. It worked too. Nursery school was five days a week and I averaged about one day a week of attendance. After awhile, my mother got the message and since it wasn’t required then, she just let me stay home. I didn’t have to deal with education again until it was time for me to go to primary school. That’s not to say my life got that much easier. I mean, where I grew up, kids definitely had a hard way to go, period.

  Now, my mother wasn’t ready for me five days a week. Not that I was not a good kid or anything, it was just my energy level was considerably higher than hers. She’d be talking about naps and I’d be scheming to get out of them. I won’t go into any of my plans here. To be truthful, they didn’t work. I couldn’t get past those naps. One thing I did figure out, though, was if I laid down with her when she came on with, “Come on, Patty, let’s take a nap” in ten minutes she’d be asleep. Then I could get up and do whatever I wanted. But most of the time I’d wind up falling asleep and blowing it.

  Oh, my name is not Patty. That’s my nickname. It’s really Patricia. But I never got called that at home unless I was in trouble. There were a couple of others that they laid on me, but I’d just as soon let them remain dead. Black folks are big on nicknames.

  Like I had three sisters. The first one was called “Sister” because she was the first sister. The second one was dark when she was born, so she was called “Smokey Joe” or “Smokey” and you can just bet she loved that. The third one was kind of red when she was born so she was called “Red” or “Redun” which is the black way of saying “Red One”. Of course as she grew up, her color changed and she was dark like the rest of us. So it’d look pretty strange for us running around calling this child “Red” but no one never thought to give her another name.

  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. What I was gonna tell you about was the solution of what to do with me.

  My daddy had a tire shop. Actually, it was a combination of tire shop and filling station. So I was sent off to work with him and I really liked that. Obviously, no kid was gonna spend the entire day around tires and come home clean. So my mother abandoned her pleas to me of being careful and not tearing up my clothes. In fact, they gave up on dresses all together. I would spend hours climbing up and down stacks of tires.

  It wasn’t all good now, don’t let me make that impression. My daddy was a firm believer in stuff like “Spare the rod, spoil the child”, “Children should be seen and not heard” and an “Idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” You know, those good fun stoppers. And he was faster with the belt than any dude I’ve ever seen. I mean, he was a pretty big man, and I never really understood why he needed a belt in the first place. His hands were bigger than my head. And as for holding up his pants, well it didn’t do much good there, either. He would put on his pants and then in less than thirty seconds, his stomach would come sneaking out over his belt. It would be less than a minute before you didn’t even know he had a belt on at all.

  Now my daddy was really proud of his shop. He had been working all his life for other people, ever since he quit school in the fourth grade. And he’d work hard and saved his money and now he was his own boss.

  The station only had one gas pump, not like these stations now with regular this, and low-lead that, and ethyl this, and super-premium that. It had regular and ethyl in the same pump. But that was enough for his customers. Most of them couldn’t buy that much gas anyway.

  He made more money selling tires. He knew how to retread them, so he could sell used tires. Plenty of people bought my daddy’s tires. The big problem he had was getting folks to pay for them. Black folks sure do love their credit. I bet, if you had to pay money to get into heaven, Black folks would be at St. Peter’s door talking about layaway. Anyway, it wasn’t so bad.

  When I first started going up there, there was this white girl about my age. Her folks owned the drug store on the corner. See, Holmon Street in Houston was sort of the big business street for Black folks at that time. The hospital where I was born was there, the elementary school I had to go to and all kinds of stores and shops. Anyway, this little girl and I used to play together. She had candy and pop from the drug store, and I had tires to crawl around in and out. So we formed a pretty good combination. At first, she was a little wimpy, but it didn’t take me long to bring her around. Actually, she liked to play dolls and I didn’t relate to that game at all, so we sort of compromised. She always played the mother with the baby and I was always the father so I never had to handle the baby.

  I never could see what was so hot about dolls in the first place. For years, my parents would go out and buy me the biggest doll in town for Christmas and I would either lose it, break it, or trade it in the first week. I mean, first off, all the dolls were white and I felt like a fool talking about “my baby” to his blond haired, blue-eyed, piece of plastic. And the kids would change their baby’s clothes, and my parents could never afford to buy me extra clothes. And sewing was a delicate art for the gifted as far as I was concerned.

  Anyway, me and the drug store kid, whose name was Mary, but most of the time I called her the “drug store kid,” would play every afternoon. We built houses out of tires and I would pretend I was my daddy fixing people’s tires and come home with them for dinner and things. We used to have a pretty good ol’ time but one day all hell broke loose. See, Mary’s grandparents owned the drug store and I guess they didn’t really care too much what she did as long as she didn’t bother them.

  Now I don’t know where Mary’s mama was, but one day she showed up. And Mary was with me at Daddy’s shop. And when her mother found her she grabbed Mary by one arm and Mary started crying because she was really holding her tight and the mama was screaming at the grandmama about letting Mary hang around with niggers and all this time she’s dragging Mary down the street. And Mary’s feet were skimming along the sidewalk like rocks on the water, and my daddy was looking all mean and since he shoved me inside the shop when all the hullabaloo had started, I knew something was definitely out of order.

  I was peeking around the door and Daddy was just standing there with his hands on his hips, then he came into the shop and called me over and told me I was not to play with Mary again. And me being dumb, asked him “Why not?” After I got up off the ground, he told me it was because he said so. I was to learn that this was the main reason for everything I was not supposed to do. And I never saw Mary again, after that.

  “Autobiography: Chapter One,” first appeared in True to Life Adventure Stories, Volume Two, in 1981.

  Shoes

  “Gal, don’t you ever do that again. You hear me?”

  “Yes, daddy.”

  Victor released his daughter’s arm and laid down his belt. Frances ran off to her room. She could hear her father still raging to her mother.

  “Tha
t girl’s gonna cost me all my jobs. Mr. Clark said she was downright insolent to him on the phone. She’s got to understand that white folks don’t like being talked to like that. They’ll stop calling and then what’ll we do?”

  “Now Victor, calm down. She’s young. She don’t understand yet about these things.”

  “Well, dammit! She better start! It don’t hurt nobody to say yessir to nobody. That girl is just too smart for her own good. Hell, she talks to me sometimes like I’m a child. All those damn teachers and books are getting to her head.”

  Frances turned over in her bed. She was angry. She had not done anything wrong. She had answered the phone; told the man that her father wasn’t home. She’d written down his name and number, said goodbye, and hung up. The only thing she hadn’t done was punctuate her sentences with sirs. Why was it so important to say sir? That was for people you respected a great deal. She didn’t even know the man on the phone. For all she knew, he could have been a drinker or a gambler. Anything. She ran her fingers over her body. She could feel the sting from the belt and trace the outline of the welts beginning to form. But she didn’t cry. No matter how long and hard he hit her, she wouldn’t cry. And she knew that got to him. I can’t stop him from whipping me, but I don’t have to cry. And that gets him every time. She smiled at the thought.

  Victoria cries if daddy looks at her funny. And Janice and Reba will cry if he whips them, but not me. She was tougher than any of her sisters and she was the youngest. I’ll never let him see me cry.

  She had come to know her father well in her ten years. In the summer, he would often take her to work with him. They moved from used-car dealer to used-car dealer. He would drag his six-foot frame from his car and put on his smile. “Howdy do, Mr. Whoever. Need any tires cut today?” And they would pause. “Well, Victor, lemme see. Yeah, I think we got a few over in the shed. Go on over and see Mr. Whoever.” He would smile his grateful smile, take his stool and retreading iron, and go find Mr. Whoever. While he worked, she would amuse herself by climbing among the stacks of old tires. And when she tired of that, she would find an old magazine in one of the showrooms and sit and read. Some days there would be many tires and she would go get in her father’s car and pretend she was some rich person, or an outlaw escaping jail. Some days she would be a rich king, or a lonely rich boy with no parents. Or she’d be on a big ranch with as many horses as a person could have.