Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  “My mother is in the hospital and I would like to go see her. Can’t you give me at least some of the six dollars?”

  “No. I don’t have it.”

  “Okay.”

  I went home steaming, but it didn’t occur to me that she would really hire someone else.

  The next day I showed up and she had a new girl already. The new girl was holding the baby who was about two or three years old. I grabbed the baby by her foot and said, “Hi, Joyce, how you doin?” The new girl ran upstairs and told the mother I hit the kid, but I didn’t know that at the time. When I saw there was a new girl, I went back home and started thinking about getting another odd job to take the place of the one I had just lost.

  I was sitting outside my house and all of a sudden here comes these two white guys. One of them was holding a long piece of paper and the boys on my block stopped playing ball when they saw him. The white guy came over to me and asked, “Can I talk to you inside for a minute?”

  A neighbor boy named Albert came running over with a friend and told me, “Don’t go in there.” He asked the fellow, “What you got in the paper?”

  At first, the fellow wouldn’t open it, but he changed his mind when he saw that Albert and his buddy were going to snatch it from him.

  The fellow had a steel rod in the paper. He had been planning to beat me with it because he thought I’d actually hit the little white child.

  Albert whistled and the other black boys started streaming down the block toward us.

  Somebody yelled, “Get your knives out!”

  The guy with the rod and his friend started running away from all those black boys with knives. Boy oh boy, 142nd Street was in a mess that day.

  God was also with us that day. The neighbor boys were right to come to my defense because the man intended to beat me with the rod. I could have been severely injured, or even killed. But the fact remains that he was a white man being chased by black boys with weapons in hand. If he had summoned the police, all of us, including me, would have been rounded up and thrown into jail.

  Somehow, I got the money to go see my mama in the hospital. Her eyes were sunken and tired looking. She tried to smile when I hugged her, but it didn’t work. She wasn’t doing too well at all.

  Before we moved into our new place, Mama had taken sick at the other house. She was one of those people that stayed real quiet if things went wrong, but I guess after a while she couldn’t keep her worries to herself. My aunt Tantee had come over one day and my mother told her that the baby hadn’t moved in a few weeks. Baby? What baby? That’s when I realized she was pregnant again.

  So Tantee asked her what she was waiting for. “Why don’t you go to the hospital?”

  But Mama worried about leaving us, and probably trying to save a dime or two, decided to take castor oil instead. It caused a lot of rumbling in her stomach, but that is all. The baby still didn’t move.

  She got very sick and had to go to the hospital anyway. At the hospital, the doctors told her that the baby had been dead for quite a while. Now she was lying in front of me, and it was very clear that every word she spoke came with a great deal of effort.

  When she came home, she was never the same. At her next appointment, they kept her. She lasted four months in the hospital. I went to see her after school twice a week.

  Having the dead baby inside her had somehow affected her lungs. Up until then, Mama had been a very healthy person, but the baby had decayed in her body and all kinds of things went wrong. That very last baby killed her. She died in 1934 at the age of forty-five and was buried on her birthday, October 29th.

  Yes, I cried for Mama when they put her in the ground. I felt sorry for her and the life which was filled with constant work. I felt sorry for me, but most of all, I felt sorry for the younger children. After all, I was nineteen years old. Some of them were still in grade school. I still needed Mama emotionally, but they needed her in a much different way. Poor little things. They could not understand where Mama had gone or that she was not coming back. It broke my heart to watch them weep.

  Sorrow creeps up behind you sometimes and you can’t see it coming. For a long time, I could be in the middle of talking or laughing, when all of a sudden, tears were streaming down my cheeks. I could be at work, snipping thread off a brand-new dress that had just come from the presser, when I would find myself wondering if Mama wanted me to help her cook when I got off. Almost at the same time, I would remember that I didn’t have a mama no more and the tears welled up in my eyes. I had to blink them back because the last thing I needed was any kind of trouble on the job.

  Mama had never been particularly jolly, and I can’t remember her laughing much, but for some reason, after she died, I would see something that made me laugh and think how Mama would have found it funny as well. More tears. Sad events about someone we used to know or the death of a neighbor or casual acquaintance would upset me a great deal. Every itty bitty thing reminded me of Mama.

  Long ago, it was believed that in times like that, it was better not to talk about the misfortune. We were taught not to speak of Mama’s illness or the terrible silence that had descended on our home because of her absence. There is no way that this could have been good for Daddy or his children. Each one of us was a walking wound with thoughts and feelings all balled up in our heads and hearts.

  Looking back, I think it would have been a lot healthier if Daddy and his children had talked about what happened to Mama. Or at least talked about her more than we did. Instead, we tried not to mention her too much so that nobody would start crying. We didn’t know how to need each other. Instead, we just kept on working. Earning money was never a bad thing to do. You could count it. You could buy groceries with it. You could save it. It was tangible. Touchable. Not like feelings which were undependable and perhaps, dangerous.

  We all pitched in and did all of the work that Mama used to do. As we got it all done, I found myself wondering how one person had managed to do it all. Poor Mama. I was honored to be able to see these things up close so that I never ever took her memory for granted. I faced all that work without complaint and remained undaunted as I knew she would have expected me to do.

  That feeling of misery stayed with me for a long time.

  While Mama was sick, the state had removed Daisy, Mary, and Tina because there was no mother to take care of them. Daddy worried about them constantly. “We have to get the tree (his pronunciation of the word three) little ones back,” he said over and over again.

  I wonder about that situation. Somewhere in big old New York City, there had to be households that were headed by a single male parent. Or, did the state remove minor children from every household when the mother died or was otherwise unable to care for them? It is a very strange part of our family story and I have wondered about it a great deal. Did Daisy, Mary, and Tina arrive at school looking unkempt a few times? Were they then questioned, and the fact that Mama had died had been determined to be the reason for an undone hair ribbon or a stained dress? Whatever the case, Daddy only shared what he figured was our business to know. Sitting around talking about the situation was not going to get the “tree little ones back,” so, as always, action was required. Soul searching, analysis, and deep thinking were luxuries. Our family was missing three children and something had to be done.

  So Daddy remarried. Our stepmother was called Mommy Dell, and as soon as she moved in, the state returned my little sisters because there was now a woman in the house all day to care for them. I guess the fact that I was nineteen and Omena was twenty didn’t mean anything because we were always working.

  Maybe working all the time kept the Potter girls out of the kind of trouble that so many parents feared. Although we didn’t have too many pregnancies among the young people I associated with, I’m sure that my father worried about it just the same.

  In our small Caribbean community, the parents was on the guy’s back just like they was on the girl’s back. They told us girls, “Keep your
legs closed, dress down, drawers up.” They told the boys, “Keep your pants buttoned up; I don’t want your girlfriend’s baby in here.” They told us like it was. “Don’t bring no babies in here.”

  These words were stated from between hard, definite lips in crisp, no-nonsense, don’t-even-think-that-I’m-playing-with-you tones.

  Many times while walking around Harlem, I would see a group of young girls (black and white) and at least one of them had her belly sticking out.

  In our small community, if you saw five or six girls, nobody was pregnant.

  None. That’s right.

  Generally in society at that time, there was more circumspect behavior among the teenagers. There was more respect for orders and the dictates of parents. In our community, we weren’t even called teenagers. We were all called children until we got up in our late teens, early twenties.

  There was one case where one girl was messed up and she and her mother didn’t get along because she was pregnant. She applied for welfare and got it. The welfare caseworker found out she was eighteen years old and told her that she didn’t have to put up with her mother’s humiliation and tongue lashings over her condition.

  “Oh, well you can get a place of your own,” said the welfare worker.

  That was the worst mistake they ever made, because if she could get a place of her own, all of the teenagers figured they could get away from home using that method as well.

  Soon, many girls were living at home, pregnant and not getting along with their parents, then welfare gave them a place and furniture. In this way, welfare encouraged children to get away from home. All of a sudden, it was a big thing going on. And it was mostly in the black neighborhoods, not where it was all white.

  I was twenty years old when I had my first date. My daughter, Cheryl, tells folk now that she “thinks it was the culture that kept Mommy from dating younger.” She is right.

  The tradition in the family coming from three previous generations or more in Anegada was that older children helped with younger siblings, the mother cooked and cleaned, while the father made the living for the family. So in our culture the daughters helped take care of the home and worried about boys much later.

  The funny thing is that Daddy never talked to us about missing Anegada or the life there, or hinted that coming here was a disadvantage. He never gave us the impression that life here was a disappointment in any way and he never spoke of himself as an immigrant. He simply became an entrepreneur and he always made a way for his family. He never spoke of himself as anything other than an American.

  When we grew up, my brothers and sisters would often share apartments to help each other get ahead financially. I think that this was another custom that followed Daddy and Mama here from Anegada. I think that visiting family members after the work week was also a tradition from the island. There was no real tourist trade on Anegada, so the people weren’t going to some hotel to work on the weekends. Instead, they spent that time with family.

  The way families made money was through fishing. The men would go fishing at three or four in the morning. The women would clean the fish. Small boats from the surrounding islands would pick up the fish and take it back for sale to the tourists. Ships couldn’t get into Anegada when Daddy was a kid, because before the channel was built, they had difficulty navigating the reefs. Even now, boats to Anegada are chartered with great care because of the reefs. That’s how both Mama and Daddy grew up, and how their parents grew up, and on back for a few generations. No one worked for other people. They worked as a community and as a family. The school on the island only went up to the eighth grade. So anyone who wanted to go further had to go to Tortola—a British island that governed Anegada.

  So I helped with the little ones and did not seriously date. At first, I went out with groups of people who were just friends. On Saturdays, we usually went to the movies. My father also allowed us to have company over. We had these new record players, and when our friends came over, there was lots of dancing, talking, and laughing. It would get loud. Every time Daddy thought it was too loud or they were staying too long, he’d walk through the apartment in his long drawers. He’d say, “I’m going to bed, I don’t want to hear no noise.” That meant it was time for our company to leave.

  I wondered what Mama would have made of all the noise and dancing. Would she have approved or just went along with whatever my father thought was right? Probably the latter.

  I loved going to the famous Savoy Ballroom. It had a huge dance floor and the club itself took up an entire city block from 140th to 141st Street in Harlem. There were two bands each night and they took turns playing tunes that kept the crowd dancing. Monday was a treat for the girls. We got in free and the boys still had to pay. Boy, those floors were slippery. The Lindy Hop dance was in then, and it was done much different than the way they show it now. When the boy threw you out and spun you around, you had to come back to the right hand. It was bigger and faster. There was also more movement. When they started throwing girls over their heads, I didn’t go for that. No way. I was afraid they was gonna drop me. I was never for too much roughness because I know I’m not that big.

  Nobody had too much money back in those days. If you went to the movies or something, you paid your own way. One fellow and I agreed in the beginning that we would go to the Apollo one night. He paid his way and I paid for myself. So we went and saw Moms Mabley. She was a comedian who dressed up in old lady clothes and looked like she had no teeth. To look at her, you would think she was not too smart. The look was deceiving. She was very smart and she told very funny jokes about life that were right on the mark. Everybody loved Moms Mabley. She told one joke that ended with the line, “Men are like buses. There is always another one coming along.”

  I should have taken that joke to heart and believed in it. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so quick to get so serious about the first guy I fell in love with.

  I had dropped out of Textile High School and started working in the factories at age seventeen, making six dollars a week. Even though it was a small salary, I was single and just helping out at home, so it went a long way. Three big rolls were five cents and a large loaf of bread was ten cents. Butter was sixteen cents a pound. On Friday, the fishman came around singing, “Bring down your dishpan, here comes your fishman.” For fifteen cents, your dishpan was filled with fish. Potatoes was one cent a pound. Kale was three cents a pound.

  I always wanted to have a bank account. When I saved up five dollars, I went to Carver’s bank and opened up an account. You would have thought it was five hundred dollars the way I was hanging on to my bank book. I felt like I was as rich as Rockefeller.

  I talked about my new bank book a lot, and when I reached twelve dollars, I was ecstatic. Everybody in the house had to hear about it. Big mistake. Daddy borrowed twelve dollars from me and I asked him for weeks to pay me back. I approached him one too many times.

  “Daddy, I want my money back.”

  His chest swelled up. He blew air in and out of his cheeks before looking me and up down in disdain. “Who do you think you are to demand money from me?”

  I said nothing.

  “Eh, girl? Answer me. You think you grown enough to live on your own? You think you grown enough that you don’t need this house?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “You asked me to loan you the money, not give it away to you.”

  This was way more impertinence than he could stand. He pointed a long brown finger toward the front door.

  “Pack your things and get out of my house. Right now.”

  “To go where?”

  “Wherever grown women go who don’t need their father’s house anymore, that’s where.”

  Then I knew how Oswald must have felt when Daddy told him that he couldn’t stay at home anymore.

  Since I didn’t have anywhere to lay my head, the best thing for me to do was get a sleep-in job. That was exactly like it sounded. You lived in th
e house where you worked as a maid and nanny. You pocketed a small salary, but at least you had a room and food to eat.

  There were plenty of employment agencies that specialized in sleep-in jobs. The way it worked was that you signed up and paid them a fee to help you find work. If you didn’t have the money to get a job, they would not help you.

  I went to a company on 135th Street and told the owner that I had no money to pay. I promised to give him the fee as soon as I got paid. I guess he looked at me and saw my pitiful desperation because he thought about it for only a minute before saying okay.

  He made some calls and got me a job right away

  “Do you have the carfare to get there?

  “Yes,” I lied.

  I felt too sad and ashamed to say no. Wasn’t Daddy worried about where I might have gone?

  The man nodded and told me that I’d be working for a Mrs. Mendleshon. The job paid thirty dollars a month. I thanked him and headed uptown to the Mendleshon residence on 224th Street and Van Cortland Park. It was a very long walk. When I rang the bell, I was tired, hungry, and upset.

  The first thing Mrs. Mendleshon wanted to know was what took me so long to get there. At the time, I thought she was being unreasonable, but she probably thought I’d been fooling around somewhere before getting on a bus.

  Before I could answer, she ushered me inside and told me that my job was a mother’s helper. She also told me that she could pay me only twenty-five dollars a month and not thirty as the agency had promised. I said okay and she took me to my room which was off the kitchen. Suddenly she looked at my empty hands.

  “Where is your suitcase?”

  “I don’t have a bag.”

  “Is this your first employment?”

  “Yes.”

  She gave me a housedress and some slippers that someone else had left behind before introducing me to her five-year-old son, David. After that, she showed me the house, which was big and nice. Everything went fine for the next two weeks.

  Then one evening, I finished all my duties and went to bed. About two hours later, I heard a man’s voice outside my bedroom door. He was calling my name. It was Mr. Mendleshon. I did not answer. He stayed there so long calling me that Mrs. Mendleshon eventually heard him, came downstairs, and asked what he was doing. He said he came downstairs to get a drink of water. She replied, “You can drink water upstairs.”