Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  I wished that I could ease my pain and the heartache that his wife had to be feeling, because by now, she surely knew about Charles, that Rip not only had one son outside the marriage but two.

  I felt even worse when I found out that both of my brothers had known that Rip was married and didn’t warn me. What kind of code did they live by where this could possibly be okay? Did it mean that male friendship came before blood? They hadn’t said a thing. After it was all over, I said to them, “I’m your sister. He was just your friend. And you knew all of this? How could you not tell me?” Their answer was, “Rip told us not to tell you.”

  I am over a hundred years old now and I’ve seen a lot and lived a lot. I understand more about people and their motivations. But even though I forgave my brothers long ago, I will never understand their silence.

  Rip wasn’t giving me any money, so I had to move from place to place. I kept getting kicked out of apartments because I couldn’t keep up with the rent. The mess was getting too thick. I started to understand why people commit suicide and take their children with them. I had to talk myself out of it by reminding myself that there was no way for me to get through the gates of heaven if I had taken my own life. The Bible is very clear on the subject of suicide.

  Then, there was the issue of murder. I had to look in the mirror and say that word out loud. My boys had a right to live.

  God sent Donald and Charles to me for safekeeping and I was thinking like a coward.

  After dismissing the plan to kill myself, I got the wild idea that my boys were going to turn out just like their father and that I should just walk away, leave them, and go off someplace by myself. I decided that that was crazy too. I had to pull myself together.

  At this point, Omena was living with my mother’s sister, Aunt Tantee. Omena suggested that since I was having such a hard time, I should stay with her and Aunt Tantee. I felt relieved and headed with her to Aunt Tantee’s house. It didn’t go like we’d planned. After a week, Aunt Tantee said that I could stay at her house during the day while she was at work but that I’d have to find somewhere else to go at night.

  Instead, I put the boys back in the carriage and went to the police precinct on 136th Street. I told them that I had no place to stay and two small children. They gave me carfare and sent me to a place on Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue.

  That is how I ended up in a homeless shelter with my two boys. We stayed there almost a year. I applied for welfare (technically the name was Aid to Dependent Children). The investigator tried to make me go back to Rip because he had a job, even though he had a terrible gambling problem and owed his boss a lot of money. But since Rip and I were never married, they could not force him to take me and the boys to the room he was renting. Finally, welfare gave me the much needed funds to get on my feet. Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like being on welfare. If you have a birthday and somebody gives you some money or something, you got to report that. If somebody gives you a gift just as a favor, you got to report that. It was hard. But they did help me get an apartment and that was what I needed most. I’ve never been afraid of hard work and I don’t believe that anyone owes me a living or free money. But I did need a home for me and my children.

  When we left the shelter, Donald was three and Charles was almost a year old. I paid $22 a month rent for the new apartment and my light bill was sixty-seven cents. All of this happened in 1940.

  Then World War II started and jobs began to open up. So, I found a job and got off welfare. That was a big mistake. There were no childcare centers. You had to just find someone, anyone, to keep your child, and it was at your own risk. There was one babysitter that I took them to for a while. I took them and their food to her every day, but when I went to pick them up, most of the time they either had sore throats or diarrhea. Many children were getting hurt and neglected in these unregulated places.

  I took Donald back to Rip’s mother and let Daisy keep Charles. She was home all the time because she was not a real outgoing person. I did this for about eight or nine months and then Abyssinian Baptist Church started taking care of kids, so I took Charles there. It cost ten dollars a week and it gave Daisy a break. It felt safe. By then he was almost three. Donald was still staying with Rip’s mother and father.

  When Abyssinian stopped keeping kids, a new group formed in the neighborhood. The deal was they would watch your kid for half your paycheck. They were unregulated and could do as they pleased. They actually demanded to see your paycheck before they signed you up just to make sure they were truly getting half. Now, I was making twenty-nine dollars a week. Half of that would have left me with hardly nothing to support three people, so I had to rely on neighbors to keep my children. This meant that I was upset all day on the job because I didn’t know how they were being treated. Many other women were in my position. We tried to stick with whoever seemed to be nice to the children, but you just never knew.

  I took Rip to court for child support and the judge ordered him to give me five dollars a week. That was $2.50 per week per child. I was supposed to go to the police precinct every week to pick it up. Since I had to work and find a place to leave the children, I figured that I would collect it every three weeks and then it would be a whopping fifteen dollars. I did not know that my plan was not workable. No one told me that if I didn’t show up every single week, the money was automatically returned to the father. So when I finally went to get it, the money was gone. Rip had it back in his pocket. I decided not to go back to the courts and fight again. Somehow, me and my children would find a way to make do with what we had.

  I decided that all men were no good . . . just a bunch of users. I went on working in the factory and taking care of my children the best way I knew how. In the factories, I got a couple of raises and I even made it up to a position called Floor Lady. Then I made it up to Assistant because I had caught on to everything so quickly, like measuring the strings which go around each garment. With each promotion came a few extra coins, and I needed every single one of them. I began to feel good.

  Then I got the heartbreaking news that Estelle, one of my childhood playmates, had died. I remembered the time when she forgot her keys and I went into her house through the window to get them. Like me, Estelle was only in her early thirties. What on earth had she died from? It took me a while to get the story, and when I learned what happened, it just made me sadder. She had just had a baby and had taken a bath. Her grandmother warned her not to go sitting out in the damp air to be with the baby’s father. Anyway, she came down with tuberculosis and died. She didn’t last no time. The baby’s father and his family took custody of her child. I ran into the baby’s father many years later. He said that the baby had grown up just fine. That made me happy.

  Even though he hadn’t given me one dollar while I was in the shelter or tried to give back the fifteen dollars that the police had returned to him, Rip soon surfaced when I had a small change of fortune.

  When Rip found out that I was out of the shelter and had my own place, he came back. He looked around the new apartment and gave me a big smile. “Gee, this is nice,” he said. “Can I get a key?”

  A slow burn started from the tip of my toes and quickly flared into my stomach and on up to my head.

  Did this man think I was a total idiot, or did he think that he was so irresistible that I would be willing to sleep with him again and get a third child? No matter what he thought, I was furious. I turned around and faced him nose to nose.

  I can’t tell anyone what I said to him. Let’s just say that it wasn’t at all ladylike and definitely not very nice.

  Rip and I were over.

  CHAPTER 5

  MOMMY DELL

  Mommy Dell was a Negro with a Southern background that had its roots in slavery. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, she was a very tall (much taller than Daddy) brown-skinned woman with a terrific smile. People always remembered Mommy Dell’s smile. Her first name was really Adele, but back then young people did not
simply call adults by their first name. Something had to go in front of it as a sign of respect. So once Daddy married her, she immediately became Mommy Dell to me and my siblings.

  Daddy met Mommy Dell after he had lost all of the businesses and got license to stand on 139th Street to sell fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. He met Mommy Dell when she became one of his pushcart customers. She had never been married or had children and was living with relatives (cousins, I think) in New York City. Daddy and Mommy Dell became friends, and after my mother passed away, they just got closer. Daddy didn’t just up and marry her right away, so it was two and a half to three years before they got married. Finally they got married, and almost immediately she got pregnant. They had a baby named Joseph, but we called him Bootsy. I had had my baby, Donald, along around the same time. After my father got himself together, he got another apartment and I moved in with him and Mommy Dell until I could move out with my baby. So at one point, Donald and Bootsy were babies in the apartment together.

  Mommy Dell was a very useful person. In other words, she was no slacker. She worked hard and liked nice things. Even though she was twenty years younger than Daddy, the two got along real good. I thought Mommy Dell was nice, but sometimes I felt sorry for her. Because she was pretty and so much younger, Daddy seemed to keep a tight leash (like some older husbands tend to do) on her. He didn’t want her to go anywhere without him.

  The only thing that I didn’t like about Mommy Dell was the extreme measures she took to get a bit of privacy in the house for her, my father, and Bootsy. She actually had a couple of guys move some of the heavy furniture around so that it created a barrier between her little family and the rest of us.

  The only thing Mommy Dell ever did that was really wrong was take some money out of Daddy’s stash and then lie about it. She was young, pretty, and maybe not used to living such a bare bones lifestyle. The desire for an inexpensive string of pearls made her filch a few dollars to buy them. Scared, she hid them and told Daddy that she had seen me go into his tin bank. Of course, I denied it but he believed his wife. She and I were on bad terms for a few weeks over that.

  On the other hand, Adele did introduce us to Southern cooking, which we were not used to at all. Our diet had always been Caribbean based and it took some time for us to get used to the new flavors. I learned to love fried chicken and barbecued ribs even though we had always stewed or baked our meat. Even though I liked some of her dishes, I did not adopt her recipes to serve my own children. Stewed, baked, or broiled was the name of the game in my home. It is a lot healthier.

  Occasionally, some of Mommy Dell’s relatives would come up to visit her from down South. They were nice and fun, but I don’t think they were used to being around Caribbean people, and a lot of our ways may have seemed strange to them. When Bootsy was about three years old, she sent him to Charleston with a pack of them so that he could get accustomed to his Southern heritage. Daddy insisted that Bootsy had to be educated in New York City, so he came back in time to start first grade.

  After about four years, the asthma which had plagued Daddy for most of his life became a whole lot worse. He started getting sicker and sicker. After a while, he could no longer stand on a street corner in all types of weather and sell fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. He and Mommy Dell began to argue over money, Bootsy, and God only knows what else. She went to stay with her New York City cousins for a while and then they got back together. When they broke up again, it was for good and she moved down to Charleston.

  Bootsy stayed in New York with Daddy until he was about sixteen years old. That’s when he got arrested for marijuana possession. Well, Daddy would never put up with that kind of behavior. When Bootsy got out of jail, he went down South to live with Mommy Dell, and I only saw him once after that. It was in the 1980s when we got word that Mommy Dell was dying. Apparently, she started getting seizures, and after taking medication for some time, the medicine wouldn’t work anymore. I went down South to see her. After I got back, we heard that she had passed away.

  Bootsy did not keep in touch with us after his mother died and I don’t know what became of him.

  CHAPTER 6

  DADDY

  Daddy was born in 1886, one of sixteen children. That wasn’t all that unusual back then because there was no birth control. Only three of the children (Daddy, Adena, who was called Dinah, and Cecily) emigrated to America. The other thirteen never even came for a visit.

  Daddy died in 1963 at the age of seventy-seven. At the time of his death, he was living on the top floor of a six-story apartment building which did not have an elevator. His asthma had become chronic over the years and there was simply no way that he could climb the stairs, so he rarely went outside. We had to bring everything he needed to his apartment.

  He must have been extremely lonely, but there was not a whole lot any of us could do about it on a daily basis. We were all too busy just trying to keep our families afloat. Worse than the loneliness was probably the lack of activity which burdened him. He had always been a man with a money-making plan, and now his health was much too bad for him to work. My brother told me that he was getting some type of financial assistance, but I can’t remember what government agency was furnishing it.

  Sometimes, Daddy would tie a string around a pail and slowly let it down the side of the building. One of my brothers would put supplies (bread, juice, sandwich meat, toilet paper, and other small things) in the pail and Daddy would pull it back up the building and carefully bring it back through his window. When no one else was available, he would pay Cheryl to run up and down the stairs doing errands for him. He was always so sick from the ongoing asthma attacks that everyone believed it was that disease which would ultimately cost him his life. We were all wrong. Daddy had a heart attack in 1963 and died shortly after arriving at Harlem Hospital. When he died, I refused to let Laura and Cheryl attend the funeral because they had been so upset after attending their father’s services years before.

  Daddy’s sister, Adena, had done very well for herself in America. She owned a private taxi company that serviced Harlem with a small fleet of cars. She purchased Harlem brownstones when they were dirt cheap. When Cheryl grew up, she purchased them from Adena’s only surviving child, Ralph. He charged Cheryl $150,000 for the best one, but there were squatters living there and she had to pay each one of them off so that they would leave. Cheryl truly has Daddy’s entrepreneurial spirit. She renovated that building at a cost of $350,000, which she had to get loans from the bank to do. Then she sold the building for a million dollars, paid off the loans, and pocketed the difference.

  Daddy’s sister, Cecily, went to Santo Domingo (and therefore spoke Spanish) before coming to America. In New York, she did domestic work for a rich woman who had some connection to a candy fortune. It is said that the woman practiced mixing chocolate for candy in the same pan that she soaked her feet in. According to the tale, Aunt Cecily spent a lot of time warning guests and other visitors not to eat any candy out of the pan.

  Cheryl really enjoyed the real estate business. Outside of Adena’s property, her first purchase was an apartment building that had nine six-room apartments. She and a doctor went in on it, chipping in something like $10,000 apiece. I didn’t like the sound of that even though he sounded like a trustworthy man and seemed very nice. It was just that Daddy had had such bad luck with partners that I wanted Cheryl to stay away from those kinds of arrangements. She felt the same way. Having a partner made her so uncomfortable that the two of them ended up selling the building and that was the end of that.

  Neither Mama nor Daddy ever returned to Anegada.

  THE STARS

  While traveling by train on my vacation

  sitting by the window.

  I happened to look up

  so many stars.

  I started to wonder

  if the skies above

  were as crowded as earth below.

  CHAPTER 7

  FINDING MY WAY

&nb
sp; Then the Lord God said, “It is not good

  for the man to be alone. I will make

  him a helper suitable for him.”

  –GENESIS 2:18

  I was totally disillusioned with men and had no interest in getting into a new relationship. In fact, I decided not to ever be bothered with any more men. I started to feel that they all were a bunch of liars because I used to hear my brothers trying to jive some girl. I also decided not to waste any more time being furious with Rip or feeling sorry for myself. Yes, I had made a hard bed for myself and I couldn’t yet see my way clear to peace, but his wife was the one with the problem, and I should consider myself lucky that I had not ended up legally married to him so that he could cheat on me and have babies with some other woman. I had two small boys to raise and I needed every drop of my energy to get that done right. There was no way that I could stay furious and be focused at the same time. When he and I broke up, I was finally established in my own place and had a reliable factory job. It was a time for looking forward, not backward.

  I stayed to myself a lot and went to the library when I could to take out books of poems and whatever I could find about American history and also the story of black people. Reading was a way to educate myself since I had never gone to college, and it also helped keep myself sane. There I was, not even thirty years old, and my life was already mapped out as far as I could see. It consisted of backbreaking factory work, child raising, housework, and church. That was it and there was nothing in my line of vision that indicated it would ever change. Sure, the boys would grow up and marry. So then I’d be alone in the house which would still need cleaning, and working at the factory to pay bills that still needed paying, and on Sundays, I would go to church and ask God to give me strength to do it all again the next day.