Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  Reading gave me hope that things could (I didn’t know how) turn out different for me. It also kept my spirits up and hope alive in my heart, because a lot of what I read made me wonder how people went through such trials and tribulations without losing their mind. I began to feel fortunate that I was existing in this time and space instead of being alive during slavery or the terrible years when the Jim Crow laws were created to keep black folks scared and on guard.

  In other words, reading made me see just how much worse my life could be, and I was grateful to God for sparing me those horrendous experiences.

  It was after World War II when my life changed again. I was somewhere one day and this fella kept looking at me and looking at me. My first thought was, What you lookin’ at?

  It wasn’t that I was a mean woman. It’s just that I didn’t like men leering at me. I thought it was fresh, and to smile at him would have meant encouraging possible bad behavior. So I frowned and turned away. Figuring that was the end of it, I started thinking about something else.

  He came over and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be staring at you, but you look so much like someone I knew in the service.”

  I said, “I have a brother in the Army. His name is Oscar.”

  “Oscar Potter?”

  “That’s him,” I confirmed.

  “Well, ain’t that something. My name is Lawrence Keeling. I was Oscar’s corporal.”

  We went on from there. He entertained me by telling me a lot about my brother’s ups and downs. It was clear that he respected Oscar and that made me feel good.

  At first, we would just go out for a drink or two. Then he wanted to get serious. I was fearful. I liked him a lot, but it seemed like men sometimes want to tear a woman down so that they can build themselves up. No. I felt free. I didn’t want anyone telling me what I could and couldn’t do. Where I could and couldn’t go. I had thanked the Lord for granting me some peace of mind.

  He asked, “Would you like to spend some time with me?”

  That meant sex and a whole lot of promises that he wouldn’t keep.

  “No way. I don’t want to hear that stuff anymore.”

  “We could get married,” he added.

  I was no longer a naïve twenty-year-old girl and I was not about to get trapped up in a new mess. This man was definitely rubbing me the wrong way.

  “I heard that mess before too.”

  He just laughed that day and shrugged it off. We kept on being friends. I realized that if we started dating, Charles and Donald would be in a sense dating him too. In other words, if he was hanging around our apartment, my children would be stuck with whatever I was doing and not be able to express their feelings about it. Then, he probably would want to spend more and more time with me, and I barely had enough time for the boys as it was. They might start to feel like they were being replaced or something. If I started spending all my free time with him, he was bound to get full of himself and think that I desperately needed a man. Then he would start taking me through changes. He would just have to give me more time to get to know him. Maybe this was nothing but a fly-by-night friendship, and if that was the case, my kids never needed to know he existed.

  Lawrence Keeling was nothing if not persistent. One night we were at a bar and having a terrific time. He said, “There’s this church right down the street. Won’t you please marry me?”

  I decided to take another chance on love.

  That was June 22, 1946. The church was at 1202 West 144th Street near Lenox Avenue, around the corner from the bar we were sitting in. It was 12:30 a.m. when we got the pastor out of his bed to marry us.

  I still had my apartment, so afterward we talked things out over there.

  I got pregnant pretty fast. I was three months pregnant when I had my first miscarriage and six months pregnant when I had the second. Both were boys. I think the miscarriages happened because I did a lot of standing on my feet. I needed to be quiet. I am a very little person and it was hard for me because I had to go to work and stuff like that. It took a lot of physical effort to stay employed during those pregnancies, but we needed the money.

  Then in 1949, my Laura came along and her delivery was very hard for me. I was terrified that something was going to go wrong and she would die before I even got a chance to hold her. She was my first girl.

  Cheryl came along in 1951, and that was a nice, easy birth. After Cheryl’s birth, I decided that I was finished. There would be no more children for me.

  Lawrence was good to me, plus he worked hard at the post office and paid the bills. I had only two concerns. First of all, he knew that I had two sons when he married me. Yet, once we were all living together, he didn’t try to hide his disinterest in Donald and Charles. In fact, he wanted them to go live with relatives. I said, “No, I’m not putting my children out for you.”

  The other problem was that he liked the bottle a little too much. It is annoying when someone is tipsy and you are not.

  A lot of new buildings were going up in our area. One of them opened up on 159th Street. It was called the Colonial Houses. Lawrence went right away and got five rooms for us, and it was a happy day for me when we moved in. It was a really beautiful place.

  Lawrence worked hard in the post office, and at first he was a good husband even though he liked to drink.

  I later found out why my husband drank so much.

  His father, James Keeling, and his mother, Genevieve, had six children: Nathaniel, Lil, Naomi, Leon, Lawrence (my husband), and Harold. James was brown skinned. Genevieve was light skinned, fair enough to pass for white.

  Their first two children were very light, sandy haired and gray eyed. The second two were red haired with hazel eyes. The last two were darker than the other four.

  James decided that Genevieve must be having sex outside the marriage or his last two children wouldn’t be so dark. He killed her with a hatchet. Their children came home from the movies and she was dead. There was blood everywhere. My husband was a teen when his mom was murdered. His aunt had the place cleaned up and let the kids stay there in the same apartment. She paid the rent and bought their food. The second eldest boy, Leon, took on the role of father to his five siblings. James Keeling died in a mental institution.

  Although my husband, Lawrence, did not witness the slaughter of his mother, he did come home to the blood splattered home after a fun time at the movies. I guess a memory of that would make anyone drink. He must have felt very scared for a very long time after that day. These days, all of the Keeling children would have probably been sent to therapy to work out their feelings about what had happened to their mother.

  All I could do when he drank heavily was pray for him. I prayed a lot.

  Lawrence and I had a few good years, but then he started messing up the money and I wasn’t making enough to cover his mistakes. After struggling financially for a time because of his irresponsible behavior, I threw in the towel. I told him, “Look, I can’t deal with this.” And that was it.

  We separated in 1953, but he used to come by and see the children. Once, when he came for a visit, he asked if we could get back together. He said, “I’m gon’ do better.”

  I told him I didn’t want to hear all that stuff. I had been through too much in my life. I told him I’d had enough mess with men. They all say they gon’ do better and then they get in and better is forgotten. Enough. Time marches on.”

  Alone once again, the Colonial Apartments became too expensive for me. So me and my four children moved into a one-room place until I could find us somewhere else to live.

  We stayed in that one room for quite a while at my friend Margaret’s house. Donald spent much of his time at his grandmother’s place. The girls and I slept in the one bed while Charles slept on a chair with his feet on the bed. Then I got lucky.

  In June of 1955, I moved into a fairly new housing project called the St. Nicholas Houses. It had only been up and running for about a year. In fact, there was still work being done
on the grounds. The housing project was eleven buildings, with fourteen stories in each building and eight apartments per floor. On the fifth floor where we lived, there were twenty-one children. I moved in when I was forty years old and lived there until I was seventy-three years old. A total of thirty-three years.

  We were lucky to get an apartment in the projects.

  With the arrival of the 1950s, blacks were still struggling to achieve their American dreams in Harlem, but oppressively high rents were a source of constant irritation and despair. Rent strikes were called to draw attention to the larcenous prices imposed on renters and move landlords to rectify long-standing problems with rats, roaches, and providing heat during the winter. For Harlem’s black residents, the discrepancies in housing availability, quality, and pricing were problems that had existed since the early twentieth century. African Americans paid higher rents in Harlem, in part as a result of landlords outside of Harlem refusing to rent to blacks. The insult of higher rents was compounded when blacks were confronted with paying the inflated prices for accommodations that were substandard and decaying. The general pattern was that the worse the accommodations, the higher the rents.

  Life for most struggling people in New York was quite hard at the start of the twentieth century. For struggling people of color, including immigrants of color, the historically toxic racial climate in the United States compounded the material burdens of building an existence that offered some degree of comfort, dignity, and happiness.

  For African Americans and immigrants of color, living conditions in New York at the start of the twentieth century could leave one breathless. Just over two and a half million people, roughly two-thirds of the city’s overall population of just under three and a half million, lived in eighty thousand tenements. Not all tenements were clusters of overcrowded humanity and incubators of disease, but there were enough to be a persisting problem of concern for urban reformers.

  Federally sponsored housing projects were built to accommodate the increased numbers of blacks who streamed in from the South to fill the numerous open vacancies in the armaments industry. In Detroit, the city whose name became synonymous with the title “Arsenal of Democracy,” the Sojourner Truth housing project was located in a part of town where, according to the rationale of officials in the federal government, there should have been little resistance from white residents in nearby neighborhoods. After a long period when the Sojourner Truth occupancies remained vacant, six black families finally moved in. It took over one thousand city and state police officers with the backing of well over a thousand members of the Michigan National Guard to see to the protection of the six families who, after all, were only seeking shelter.

  When we moved into the projects, Laura was about to turn six and Cheryl was four. I put Laura in school and registered them both in the children’s center at the St. Nicholas Houses. So that was a break there when it came to child care.

  My father had taught us not to get what you don’t need and not to go after anything you can’t afford. My sisters and I followed those lessons as adults, and I taught them to my children. They had to save a portion of any money they received, no matter how they got it. They were not allowed to throw away the portion that they were allowed to spend. The girls had to spend most of it on something that they needed and not always on something silly and useless that they wanted. One very important lesson that they had to learn was how to wait. It is usually the case that when young people get a dime in their hands, they want to spend it right away without thinking, without preparing, without even giving a thought to the value of the dime and how lucky they were to get it. No matter what the girls decided to spend their loose change on, I made them wait at least a day and think about the purchase. No impulsive spending. That kind of behavior leads to problems when they’re grown up.

  So, through careful money management, I was able to pay my bills, including the $56 per month rent.

  By that time, my boys were big, in their late teens, and I encouraged them to go out on their own. I wasn’t willing to take care of any man, whether it was my son or not. It was also important for my children to learn to stand on their own two feet. By then, Charles had gotten mixed up with some girl, so he moved out, but he came by often. I was surprised that Charles even listened to me and moved out because Charles had always been such a mama’s boy.

  I cautioned all my children about their choices, just as my father had done to us. He didn’t talk much, but what he said went right to your head. He was a firm believer in that old saying that “if you make your bed hard, you got to lay in it.”

  After Lawrence and I broke up, the post office let him go. I didn’t know that they were going to do that just because I had complained to them about his not bringing home his paycheck. I was shocked. But he did it to himself. It turns out that he had been drinking on the job as well. They had been pretending not to know because he was a very good worker, but finding out that he also had problems at home forced them to do something. I didn’t know all of that until much later. All I knew was that Lawrence was running a tab at the liquor store even though he knew that our rent wasn’t paid. I wasn’t able to shoulder the financial burden by myself, plus I didn’t know what he was doing with the money that he had stopped bringing home. Soon, I had an eviction notice and I went to the post office to see if they could send his pay directly to me since he was being irresponsible. I had no idea that they would get rid of him, but I can’t let anybody run all over me. It was a terrible situation and it was time for him to find another place to live.

  Don’t get me wrong. I did not arrive at that decision lightly. I knew what it was to be the only breadwinner with two kids looking at me for something to eat three times a day. I knew what it was to be separated from the father of my children and having no one to bounce ideas off or consult about anything when I really needed someone to talk to. I knew what it would feel like to have my girls asking when Daddy was coming home. But with all that drinking, I was getting little to no emotional support anyway.

  When I think about all that I had gone through up until that point, I feel like screaming.

  My husband moved around a lot after that, from his sisters’ to his brothers’ homes.

  The doctor had been telling Lawrence to stop drinking for years, but he didn’t listen. He died of a heart attack at age forty-two.

  The funeral was a nightmare and it was with this that I made one of my biggest mistakes as a parent. I took our two girls to their father’s funeral. They had never been to one before and they became very upset. Afterward, it took a lot of work for me to help them get over it all. I think the biggest problem was that no matter how hard things had ever gotten for me, they had never seen me shed a tear. I, as the widow, sat up front on the first bench. My girls sat right behind me. When that organ music swelled up, I broke down. My girls started whimpering at first, but after a while it all became too much. Cheryl actually climbed over the bench to get to me instead of simply going into the aisle and walking.

  Lawrence and I had never divorced and I never remarried.

  MOTHER’S DAY BLUES

  I love you mother

  said John Jr.

  forgetting his chore.

  His cap went on and

  off to the playground swing

  leaving mother the wood to bring.

  I love you mother

  said her daughter.

  Sure, after breakfast

  I’ll do my chores.

  I promise you.

  Before she could do her best

  telephone rang.

  When she put the receiver down

  off she went in a flash.

  Leaving the kitchen in an

  awful mess.

  I shall return soon said her husband

  John Sr.

  to prepare dinner

  then we will go to a movie.

  That will be nice said his wife.

  it will make my day.

  Hours later when the
phone rang

  I’m stuck in a card game

  her husband said.

  Well, replied his wife

  you’ve ruined my day.

  CHAPTER 8

  SINGLE MOTHER HOOD

  Children are a heritage from the Lord,

  offspring a reward from him.

  –PSALM 127:3

  There I was with four kids to finish raising, two from a broken engagement and two from a marriage that had not worked. Donald and Charles were already in their late teens with serious girlfriends and rarely lived at home. When they were younger, I let them both become Boy Scouts to keep them out of the streets and give them some more values to live by. I also used to take them to the armory where they could run and exercise in a safe place. I was determined to keep my sons out of trouble and far away from street life. After the breakup with their father, I didn’t want them anywhere near him. He was a plain liar from start to finish. I knew that he owed a lot of gambling debts, and I was fearful about what else he might be involved in that could get my sons into trouble. But now they were young men who didn’t need me as much. They knew right from wrong. So when I found out that they were spending time with Rip, I didn’t try to stop them.

  My focus was on my two little girls. Laura was now nine and Cheryl seven.

  I did not wonder what would have happened if I had insisted that Rip marry me before we became intimate. I refused to consider how my life would have been different if I had not believed Rip when he told me that he was not married. Regrets in the form of shoulda, coulda, woulda don’t do a body any good. In fact, sitting around thinking like that can either paralyze you to the point where you can’t move forward at all or just plain drive you crazy. I never saw either of my parents look back in regret and whine about what did or did not turn out right. I worked very hard to follow their habit of looking and moving forward. Up till this point, my ability to keep on keeping on no matter what happened came directly from their examples.