Can't Nothing Bring Me Down

by Ida Keeling

  I’m sure that Laura and Cheryl did not have everything they wanted, but neither has memories of going to bed hungry, sitting in the dark because I didn’t pay the light bill, or coming home to find our belongings on the street because I didn’t or couldn’t pay the rent.

  I made sure that my girls lived in peace. Our apartment was free of the arguing, physical violence, and strife that was part of the lives of so many people that we knew in the projects. But I could not control what they saw or heard when they stepped outside the cozy environment that I created for them.

  When I moved into the St. Nicholas Houses, it was a great relief to find that they had doors on the closets. I had lived in many tenements that didn’t have doors. I made drapes, kept the house clean, and every Saturday I washed all the windows. I learned how to play the numbers, which was like today’s lottery games except that it was run privately by individuals and there were no taxes taken out of the money. I rarely won, but if I did, I’d buy furniture or clothing or stuff for the house like clocks and towels.

  Very often there were emergency situations in the projects, and police or an ambulance were needed to help someone or to restore peace. There used to be a joke that if you wanted them to respond to your emergency, the best thing to do was to call and say that you were a white person. One nice chocolate brown lady had some friends who took that seriously. She had fallen and someone called the ambulance. It seemed like the ambulance was taking a very long time to get there, so some of the guys called the precinct and said, “There is a white lady on the ground out here and all of these guys are just standing there looking.” The police and the ambulance arrived in seconds.

  I always had at least two jobs. When I worked at the factory, I also worked at the Horn and Hardart restaurant. After I had taken a typing course and found work at the Hebrew Congregation, I also worked at Sons and Daughters of Israel. Sometimes I would be so tired. When I would get in the bed, it seemed like every side I laid on was exhausted. By the time I finished all four sides, the alarm clock would go off and it was time to get up and do it all over again.

  There was a period where I had two jobs but money was still so tight that I figured out a way to get a third. It was just for a few hours on the weekend and I didn’t plan to keep it more than six months. So one night I took Laura and Cheryl to Omena’s house.

  Now, Omena’s next-door neighbor was a beautiful single woman named Ann who had two boys of her own and a no-account adult brother who also stayed in her apartment. Well, Ann was a gorgeous party thrower who was always dressed up and never seen in the wintertime without a fur coat on, probably given to her by a boyfriend. She was very pretty and was considered quite a babe. She used to like to have parties, and there was always noise and laughter coming from her apartment. Anyway, the brother fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand and it started burning the sofa cushion that he was sleeping on. Ann’s place filled with smoke and the smell seeped into Omena’s place. She opened her front door to a hallway clogged with smoke and a screaming Ann who had stepped out and was now being restrained by firemen. My kids remember Omena pushing them hard in their sleep and then dragging them out of bed and to the fire escape.

  Both of Ann’s little boys died in her apartment that night. Her brother somehow got out alive.

  When I got off the train and was coming down the street, I could see the big, charred black hole on the fourth floor of Omena’s building. Some woman who had witnessed the tragedy came up to me and said, “Isn’t that sad that both of them died?”

  I was sick.

  I started running until I reached Omena who was standing outside with my two precious girls. I have never been so glad to see them.

  I hope that my daughters never knew when my fingers ached or my neck and back hurt from working hard. I never wanted them worrying about me simply because I was doing what a mother is supposed to do. I could not afford to fall apart, because if I went down the tubes, I would take my two smart and beautiful girls with me. I could not afford to pay attention to the neighbors who felt that I thought my kids were better than theirs simply because I wanted the best for them.

  Sometimes I needed help either financially or just someone to listen while I worked out a problem. I usually turned to my brother, Oswald. He was the brother that was always there for his sisters. Whatever you had to do, you could count on him. Oswald used to shine shoes at Mr. Rose’s every chance he got. He saved over fifty dollars. Mama wanted to put it in the bank for him, but Daddy took it.

  Oswald stayed with me and my daughters whenever he was on leave from 1956 to 1960, but after four years, I wanted him to find his own place. Even though he helped me out a lot by giving me money and always bought us nice things, my girls were growing up, so I needed my space. Daisy and I helped him to find an apartment that he enjoyed until he started having kidney trouble. After working in the merchant marine for thirty-eight years, he was relieved of his duties in 1972 for medical reasons. He was sick on and off after that, in and out of hospitals, and passed away in 1988. I still don’t think that Daddy should have kicked Oswald out of the house when he was only seventeen years old. Daddy should have been proud of him for getting his own cart and earning his own living. I think Oswald had guts.

  Omena and Daisy lived together and they watched Laura and Cheryl while I was working, sometimes as many as three jobs. When neither one of them could babysit, I left the girls with Miss Washington, our neighbor. In exchange for her help, I took care of Miss Washington’s little baby when she had things that she needed to do.

  I took the girls to church every Sunday, but I would not take them early in the morning. They got up very early to go to school all week and I worked all week. My children and I needed our Sunday mornings for relaxation and reading the paper or talking. We went to church around 1:30. I made sure that they were raised in the Methodist church because both my parents had been Methodists. Salem Methodist had been my childhood home church, so that is where we went even though there was a Baptist church close by which had afternoon and evening services. For a time, both girls took dancing lessons. They didn’t get a lot of sweets and rarely ate fried food. On Sundays, I usually made pot roast. On other days, we mostly had lamb stew, liver and grits, fish and grits, or boiled spareribs. The menu was pretty much what Mama had served me and my siblings when we were growing up. The girls were both good scholars and made excellent grades in school. In fact, Laura ended up getting skipped a grade.

  The St. Nicholas Houses began to change when drugs took over in the 1960s and 70s. Of course, there had always been drug activity, particularly when heroin was all the rage, but overnight it seemed like there were junkies everywhere. All lined up against one of the walls where my children could not help but see them as they walked to and from school. Worse, drug dealers began to live in the buildings. During the crack epidemic of the 1980s, it became a downright vicious place to live. I could only hope that the madness would not find its way into my home.

  Once the girls got into high school and I had more time for myself, I went back to school. I loved math and I loved learning about office procedures. I also learned new machines. I catch on pretty quickly. I took some night classes in math, keypunching, and working the collating machines. Then I was able to get out of the factories and get some office work. I felt like a big shot.

  I had lived through the Great Depression so I knew how to get through hard times. The Depression taught people how to stand on their own two feet and make do with what they got. Back then, everybody was broke.

  As the girls were growing up, I was kind of strict for one simple reason: I had to work and they needed to obey the rules that I laid down in order for everything to run smoothly. As soon as Laura turned ten, I tried to give her a key to get in and out, but she was scared and didn’t want one. Instead, I gave it to Miss Washington, our neighbor. Laura would come home from school and pick up the key from her and go in the apartment and they could start with their homework. I tried to get home as ear
ly as I could. They had their chores to do, shopping, and washing some of their clothes. They also had to clean the apartment, except for my room; they were not allowed to go into my room. That went well. Sometimes my girls spent weekends at the home of their father’s brother, Leon Keeling. We visited often because I wanted to stay in touch with the Keeling family. I also liked to take Laura and Cheryl with me to visit my own aunts and uncles who were still alive.

  I used my free time to be with my girls so that they would know they were important to me.

  When we couldn’t think of anything else to do, we took the ferry to Staten Island. We had hot dogs and soda on the ferry, and once we got off, we walked around and then had some dessert. Then we’d come home and eat our beans and rice and whatever else I had cooked and that would be the end of the day. We never had big money, but I made do. My daughters say that “Growing up, we knew that we were the most important part of Mommy’s life. We had a rich life and never felt that we missed anything.”

  When the girls were growing up, they got along pretty good because they were only a year and ten months apart in age and had the same ideas. As time moved on and they split up and went to different colleges, started traveling and got different friends, everything seemed to change. Little jealousies about this and that started popping up. Only one thing remained the same: the dedication to family. They respected each other’s talents and abilities, and although the closeness seemed to go away, they came together when it came to kinfolk. When something came up related to family that needed to be discussed, they would do that, but the friendship was never as strong once they got older.

  My neighbors believed that I thought I was better than everybody else. It wasn’t that. I just wanted my girls to have a real chance in life, so I kept my distance. When I came out of the building, sometimes they’d yell, “Hey, Big Money.” They called me that because me and my girls always looked nice. When we came out of the building, we were headed somewhere. We didn’t just hang around outside the projects. My children and I always had a destination. My neighbors didn’t know that I had nothing, although they should have since we were all living in low-income housing together. Then they started saying that I was raising my kids like they were white just because they had dance lessons and went to a free sleepaway camp every summer.

  My elder daughter, Laura, was picked on in school because she was dressed nice and didn’t behave in a rowdy fashion. She kept to herself all the time. She preferred reading books to playing outside. The other kids told her that she thought she was better than them. They didn’t know that Laura was simply shy.

  The family is supposed to stick together if they can help each other. But if I had to do it all over again, I would have said no to some of my family’s requests. At least a few times. I was the sister who would never say no and everyone knew it. It made me vulnerable.

  I had always wanted a nice fat bank account, money put aside in case real hard times came back, but there was always a setback. In fact, every time I tried to start a bank account, something happened in my family. My relatives knew that I believed in saving, so the thinking probably went, “Oh, Ida probably got some money. Let’s go to her.” It seemed like every time I saved up at least two hundred dollars, somebody was in need and I had to part with it to help the person out of a bad situation.

  All my brothers had pretty good jobs by this point. My older brother, Oswald, was a seaman. He worked for the United Fruit Line. The middle one, Nollas, worked at the post office. All my brothers had been in the service and so had both my sons. One of my nieces and her husband even retired from the Air Force as lieutenant colonels. We were hardworking people with big ideas and little pay. All I had done was the factories, Horn and Hardart restaurant, and a few low paying clerical jobs that I worked at for some time after I came out of the factories.

  I never made nothing over minimum wage all my life. But I kept up with my bills. I used to get compliments from the gas company, the light company, and the insurance company because as soon as I got the bills, I paid them. I didn’t want to deal with late payment fees and other things that dribble away your money. Paying interest and things like that was a bad idea. You ended up paying twice as much as you originally owed. I paid the whole bill right away. It helped clear my mind which was messed up enough.

  Both of my girls were always in the classes for gifted children. In fact, they were featured as outstanding children in a booklet that used to go around the district. When they got older, I didn’t have to tell them to get jobs. They really wanted to work. In fact, Cheryl once got a summer job by lying about her age. You had to be at least fourteen to get working papers in New York City. She was younger than that. Both my girls were happy when they finally turned fourteen and they were able to work legally. Both got jobs. The jobs were part-time and paid only around thirty-eight dollars. I told them they had to get their books and stuff out of that money.

  As my girls got into their teens, they went to parties but had to be back at a certain hour. They were very good at following my rules.

  Sometimes I would get ahead just a little bit and someone would ruin it. That got on my nerves. One time, I managed to save money to get a little washing machine. It was cheap, nothing fancy, but in the projects every little thing is a big deal. My neighbors saw it being delivered to my apartment, and the next thing I knew, one of them asked if she could come over and wash some of her things. “I’ll bring a bottle,” she said. “We’ll hang out.”

  It was common in those projects for people to start hanging out in your house and using up all your resources so that they could save their own. From what I had observed, they usually brought something—food, drink—at first. Then they simply started showing up and consuming what you had. By that time, it would be hard to complain about it because the assumption would be that a close friendship either had developed or was in the works.

  My answer was firm and final. “No. Don’t even start it.”

  Then Charles came by and wanted to wash some stuff. I said that he could, but I noticed a buckle on a pair of pants that he wanted to wash. I told him not to put the buckle part in the machine. I left the kitchen where the machine was hooked up. I wasn’t gone long before I heard a popping sound. He had not listened to me and the machine broke. That was the end of that.

  Then the boys started getting into trouble. Charles wound up in the youth house and I had to go down and get him out. Folks told me that he and his friends partied on the roof a lot and took girls up there. Something was bound to go wrong and it did. It turns out that Betty was one of those girls up there on the roof with Charles. He got Betty in trouble (which was what they called pregnant back then) and she was only thirteen years old. He was almost seventeen. The truant officer was after the girl’s mother because she had been out of school for thirty-four days. The mother tried to tell him that the girl had been coming to my house. I said no way. The two of them had been getting together on her grandmother’s roof. There was no way I would have allowed any sexual activity in my house.

  Betty had the baby at age fourteen. She had nothing to offer any guy, no home of her own, and she was at a spiteful age and an age that can be very stubborn. At fourteen years old, a girl goes through chemical changes and body changes. I was that age myself and know what goes on. Charles had nothing to offer Betty either. They were just two teenagers who had gotten themselves in a real mess. The problem was that everyone in her family decided that I had to be the one to fix what was definitely unfixable. What was I supposed to do? There was no putting that genie back in the bottle.

  Once Betty had her baby girl, her mother tried to pawn the whole situation off on me, but I was not having it. The last thing I needed was Charles, an infant, and an underage girl bringing people in and out of my house while I was out trying to make a living for me, Laura, and Cheryl.

  But the situation grew desperate, so I ended up letting them stay. It was a terrible situation because Betty came from a good home. I tried to keep
her from getting pregnant again after the first child was born by telling her to do something with her life because “Charles doesn’t want anything.” It was a situation that should not have happened. She wasn’t some tragic kid out of the projects. In fact, she didn’t even grow up in the projects. She lived with her mother and grandmother nearby in a very nice apartment building. Mamie, the grandmother, raised Betty on 143rd and Seventh Avenue. Betty was a very uppity, light skinned girl whose mother and grandmother wanted her to have the best.

  Mamie walked around with what she thought were high-class mannerisms, but she didn’t take no crap off no man and would throw them out if they didn’t act right. Although Mamie was tough talking, she was very loving with Betty, who was a pretty girl. Mamie had her in Catholic school. The uniform was how kids distinguished themselves from the public school kids. Betty was fun and had a great laugh. Her youngest child, Juanita, laughs just like her.

  Betty grew up an only child, but when she was a teenager, her mother Gloria gave birth to two more children from some guy. Their names were Bobby and Brenda.

  When Betty got pregnant with Denise, Gloria threw her out. I eventually let her move into my house. When Howard was born, the baby was brought to my house. What could I do in this situation? I couldn’t see those babies end up in the street. But watching a child try to be a mother was hard to do. One time, Betty was scolding two-year-old Denise for peeing in her pants, and Cheryl got very angry because Denise was just a baby. But Betty simply had no mothering capacity and was doing the best she could. Whatever she thought she might have had got used up because there were so many babies. They were all at my house, and after Juanita was born, she and Charles moved out again and got an apartment. They used to come on the weekend to see me.