When Donna was five, Jeanette was four, and I was almost two, Daddy came home one day and found Mommy looking grim. “What are you so down in the mouth about, Tass?” he asked.
“Didn’t you hear?” she said softly, “A little girl no bigger than Donna here was raped outside the building last night”
Daddy sat down heavily at the kitchen table. He put his head in his hands. When he looked up again, it was to tell Mommy to start packing, they were leaving the city.
“Going where, Donald?”
“You want to go back to where you come from in West Virginia?”
“I sure don’t.”
“Then we got to go to Long Branch where I come from.”
“Your family doesn’t like me.”
“Tass, honey, I don’t know no other place for us to go, and we can’t have the girls growin’ up here. Like it or not, we got to go to Long Branch.”
And that very day we did.
2
The House That Donald Built
THE FIRST THING DADDY DID IN LONG BRANCH was to apply for a job at Fort Monmouth, an Army base on the outskirts of town. The hiring office didn’t say yes and didn’t say no. “They just kept sauntering around, sauntering around,” as Daddy described it, and he grew so fretful and so concerned about no money coming in that he called New York and arranged to return to his jobs there, resigning himself to the time and expense of having to commute an hour each way. Tass suggested, “Give it one more day, Donald. Go back to Fort Monmouth on Monday.”
He did—and waited around, waited around. A major said, “Come back tomorrow.” Daddy fumed to Mommy that if he did that, he would miss a second day of work and how were they going to buy food and pay rent? “Just one more day,” Tass urged. Daddy went back and hung around and grew even more frantic. If there was anything he hated, it was to waste time because, “When you lose time, it’s something you can’t never get back.” He was pacing the floor like a German shepherd on a chain when a secretary emerged from an inner office and commented, “I can see you’re unhappy, Mr. Thornton, but it’s okay. You went on the payroll as of yesterday.”
On the payroll as a ditchdigger. “But I didn’t care what it was,” Daddy said, “so long as I was close to home and didn’t have to pay the money to go back and forth to New York.” Because the wages were ditchdigger’s wages, he began asking officers if he could wax their cars on the weekends, their wives if he could wash their windows or polish their floors. Any odd job, any repair, the minute he heard about it, he’d say, “Yes, indeed, I’ll get that done for you as soon as I get off work,” and when people discovered how willing Daddy was and how pleasant, they called on him often and felt friendly toward him. “Don, can you use this piece of furniture?” they offered. “Don, would you like to have these clothes to take home to your children?”
“But when it came time for me to advance, to be something more than a laborer,” Daddy recalled, “they didn’t know me. I caught on then to what part I played. I played subserviency. I played Uncle Tom. They tossed me what they wanted me to have, and I thanked them.”
He was not being sarcastic about his thanks; he had no time or use for resentment. The broken tables and chairs were braced and painted and used to furnish our two-bedroom apartment in Garfield Court, a low-income housing project in Long Branch that Daddy qualified for as a veteran; and Mommy, who was clever at sewing, ripped the seams of the clothes, cut the cloth down, and made outfits for us kids.
Even with such shifts to make do, by Wednesday or Thursday of each week, the money Daddy brought home had been spent. “Don’t keep asking me where it went,” Mommy protested to Daddy. “If you think you can do better, you try buying the food.”
“Well, why don’t I just see if I can make the money stretch some,” said Daddy, and from then on, he did the shopping and managed the family finances. In Asbury Park he bought day-old bread for a nickel a loaf; at Freddy’s meat market on Broadway, he got a markdown on the ends of rolls of salami and bologna and on cuts of meat and chickens that had lingered in the case too long. Scraps and soup bones were thrown in for free.
Sometimes Daddy took us kids along with him to the butcher shop. “These are my girls I brought for you to see,” he would say as though to show the butcher that the bargains he gave Daddy were going into the making of sturdy, well-behaved children. If the butcher needed his sidewalk patched or his showcase polished, Daddy did these things as a favor in return. He was never a trimmer, only a man at the bottom of the heap scrambling to make ends meet.
Daddy diced and sliced the scraps and cut the mold off the meat. Occasionally he hesitated with his knife in the air. “I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t cut the green out; it’s like filled with that penicillin that keeps you girls healthy,” but I think he said that to tease us. He made stews and spaghetti sauce out of the scraps and fried up the chickens, serving the backs and necks to himself and giving Mommy and us the breasts, thighs, wings, and legs. He wanted us to have the best of what he could get, and he made sure of two things: there was always enough for seconds and Donald’s kids never ate oatmeal.
One night we were having pork chops for supper when a woman selling encyclopedias came to the door. Mommy had no money to buy, but always hospitable, and perhaps in need of some adult conversation after a day spent with small children, she invited the woman in. Jeanette, at four, had other ideas. She planted her small self in the doorway and told the saleswoman firmly’, “Go home and eat your own pork chops.”
That feisty little girl looking out for her own interests was a blueprint for the teenager and adult to come. Donna, the first-born, was pliant; I, the middle child, eager for love and approval, was well behaved; and Rita and Linda, the fourth and fifth girls, were malleable. Jeanette was the spirited one, the rebel, the freethinker. Only Jeanette defied Mommy and Daddy’s ban against playing with the other kids in the project, and when she was promptly struck in the head with a brick, that was quite enough to confirm for the rest of us that we must do what our parents said. But Jeanette, then and later, went her own way, even if it meant taking a hit.
Except for Donna, we were all named after celebrities: Jeanette MacDonald, Rita Hayworth, and Linda Darnell were movie stars of the day. My name, Yvonne, came from one of the famed Dionne quintuplets. The odds against quintuplets—one in 65 million births—were about the same as the odds against any of us amounting to anything in this world despite our elegant names. There was irony in plump little black girls bearing the names of sleek white stars of the silver screen, but to us at the time, it all seemed perfectly natural and rather flattering, as though some of the glamour of the famous would descend to us even if Daddy did say we were black and ugly. Jeanette, when it became fashionable in the 1960s, toyed with the idea of taking an African name, but the rest of us just laughed. We liked our names, and besides, even if our forebears had come to this country involuntarily, that was at least two hundred and fifty years ago. We had been here far longer than most Americans, so how could we be anything but American?
About the time Donna was ready to start school, we moved to a larger apartment in Seaview Manor, another housing project in Long Branch. Liberty Street School was a convenient two blocks away, but Daddy checked it out and discovered that it had a black principal, black teachers, and a virtually all-black student population.
“The thing of it is,” he reasoned with Mommy, “the white people see to it that they get the best, so if we want our kids to do well, they’ve got to go where the white kids are.” This meant, not to Liberty Street School, but to Garfield School, which was a mile and a half away. Somehow Daddy wangled it so that Donna, and later Jeanette and I, started out there. Daddy’s theory was that we should go to school with children who had goals, or whose parents had goals for them. “Our kids’ll watch the white kids,” he predicted, “and they’ll hitch a ride on their wagon.”
As each of us started school, he solemnly instructed us to “pick out a rabbit.” He explained how, i
n greyhound racing, the dogs ran their hearts out because they were chasing a rabbit that whizzed around the track ahead of them, and that’s what he wanted us to do: study our hearts out to come in first. He said, “You’ll go to class and pretty soon you’ll notice one of the kids does real good, is out in front of the rest. That’s your rabbit. If that kid gets an A, that lets you know you can get an A too. You just have to try harder.” He was right. A girl named Patricia was my rabbit, and however good her grades were, I worked until I caught up with her, and sometimes my momentum carried me right on past her.
Other than having a crush on a boy named Carl, who was the only other chocolate chip in a sea of vanilla faces at Garfield School. I remember nothing about my year there except the wretched morning I had an “accident.” Mommy had drilled it into all of us that, “When the Lord’s Prayer is being said, or the Pledge of Allegiance, you’re to be as still as soldiers.” Being a conformist, I did not dream of going against this dictum even on a morning my bladder was full to bursting. I held out until the end of the ceremony, but release from soldierdom came too late. The part of my clothing that escaped soaking, I then proceeded to drench with tears. Mommy was sent for, and when she came to get me, I assured her through mortified sobs that I would never set foot in school again.
“If you let yourself be stopped when something bad happens,” she said quietly, “you won’t be around when something good happens.” Mommy bathed me and dressed me in my best little pleated skirt and a starched white blouse, and I felt so pretty that somehow it seemed all right when she delivered me back to the classroom.
In its way, this episode was as emblematic of me, the conformist, as the pork chop incident was of Jeanette, the rebel. Both foreshadowed the parts we were later to play in the central drama of our family life.
Under the GI Bill, Daddy was also attending school, studying at night to be an automotive technician. He completed the course, only to find that advancement was closed to him as a black man at Fort Monmouth. He maneuvered a switch to janitorial work on the night shift and landed a second, civilian job during the daytime making home-heating-oil deliveries. On weekends, for fifty cents an hour, he worked as a hod carrier for a mason, and as soon as he learned how to run a straight course of bricks and knew how much sand and water went into the mixing of mortar, he began making plans to build a house for us.
A lot on Ludlow Street, at right angles to Lippincott Avenue where Daddy’s parents lived and close to Gregory School where he wanted us to go, came up for tax sale. Daddy had saved the transportation money that came with the GI Bill, and he asked his father to bid on the lot for him, since he himself would be at work. His father did—and won the bidding at two hundred dollars.
Deed in hand, Daddy went to the Shadow Lawn Bank in Long Branch and applied for a mortgage. He was refused. Politely, he asked a bank vice president the reason. “Don, you seem like an okay fellow,” the bank officer told him, “but we don’t give loans to blacks, and I’ll tell you why. There are not too many colored people in town. Suppose you can’t keep up the payments on your loan and we have to take your house. Who are we going to sell it to?”
Daddy had to accept the man’s reasoning, but he refused to accept that he could not build a house just because the bank did not want to give a black man a mortgage. With the last of the little bit of money he had saved, Daddy hired a man who owned heavy equipment to dig a hole for the cellar. With stakes and strings he marked a rectangle fifty feet back from the street where the house would stand.
“Why you leavin’ so much space in front?” the bulldozer operator objected.
“On account of my kids,” Daddy said. “Suppose they come runnin’ out the front door or ‘round the side of the house. If the house is close to the street, they’re out in the road and maybe getting’ hit by a car ‘fore they know it. This way, puttin’ the house fifty feet back, their little legs’ll get tired and they’ll fall down before they run out into the street.”
It was part of Daddy’s philosophy that. “You should always be thinking ahead. Otherwise you’ll hear yourself saying ‘Oh,’ and let me tell you, Oh can be an awful big, awful mournful word.”
With the hole for the cellar dug, every time Daddy earned a few extra dollars, he bought ten or twenty concrete blocks, and with Mommy acting as his hod carrier, bringing him wheelbarrows of mortar while he laid up the blocks, he started work on the foundation. I still have a snapshot from that time, and Mommy, pushing a wheelbarrow, is visibly pregnant.
All of her pregnancies had been difficult, with a great deal of bleeding, caused, she always claimed, “by you kids lying on my right kidney.” From how prominent her cheekbones became, Daddy could recognize when she needed a blood transfusion and he would bundle her off to the clinic at the hospital. Whether it was because of the heavy work on the foundation or the cumulative effects of five pregnancies, it took eighteen pints of blood to bring Mommy through this pregnancy—blood donated by men at Fort Monmouth, both black and white, which touched Daddy to the point of tears. The doctor informed Daddy that, at peril to Mommy’s life, there must be no more pregnancies. He and Mommy agreed to a tubal ligation, although Mommy wept, not for herself, but because now Donald would never have a son. Donald turned the sharp thought over in his mind long enough to wear off its bitter edge. One day he sat by Mommy’s bedside and cupped her hand like an injured bird in his thick, work-hardened fingers. “Tass,” he told her, “for me to work hard for myself is no purpose. But for me to work hard for my wife and my children who need me, that has come to be my purpose and that’s all I need. It don’t matter that we don’t have a boy. There’s nothin’ I could do with a boy that we can’t do with our girls.”
It was this talk with Tass. It was the ribbing Daddy took about having yet another girl. It was being immeasurably grateful to the doctor for pulling Tass through. It was the thought Daddy had that: “I can’t imagine nothin’ greater than knowin’ how to make someone well. People are bound to respect you if you can do that, it don’t matter what color you are.” It was these things coming together in the unconscious well of his mind that made the claim that his five daughters were going to grow up to become doctors rise up and jump out of Daddy’s mouth, surprising him almost as much as it did his hearers.
It don’t matter what color you are if you can make people well. As Daddy replayed his brave joke and realized that his daughters might indeed transcend their color if they became doctors, his tossed-off statement hardened into the determination that fueled his life from then on.
With so little money to buy building materials, progress on the house was almost imperceptible after two years, and the city sent a notice that the cellar hole must be filled in; trapped rainwater was turning it into a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Daddy went to city hall. “I didn’t challenge the man,” he told Tass. “I didn’t argue. I just said, ‘Look, I’ve got a family. I’ve got five little girls and I’m tryin’ the best I can to build a house for them.’ The guy looks at me a long time. ‘Forget the notice,’ he finally says. ‘Go back to work.’ That’s what I’ve done all my life—I’ve never challenged the other guy; I’ve just tried to make him understand where I’m comin’ from and where I’m goin’.”
Chatting with the Italian owner of the building-supply yard one day, Daddy mentioned the order from the city and the reprieve he had been granted. Joseph Calabretta asked a few questions, and Daddy explained what he was trying to do, that he was building the house on Ludlow Street so his daughters could go to school in the white part of town to get a start on a good education and become doctors.
“Don,” said Mr. Calabretta, “I don’t hear young fellows talk like you. I’ll tell you what—you get anything you need from my yard and you pay me when your house is done.”
Daddy read in Mr. Calabretta’s face that he meant it. “Oh, that made me feel good,” he remembered. “I said to myself, this is some guy to talk to me like this. Now I can really go to town.” He ordered five hundred block
s and bags of sand and cement, and they were delivered without a bill. He ordered five hundred more. The house began to rise around him.
Now that Daddy knew he was really going to get the house built and that we actually would be living there someday, he wanted us transferred to Gregory School. The principal checked and said there was no such address as 174 Ludlow Street. Daddy told her that he was building the house and that, in the meantime, we were living with our grandparents around the corner on Lippincott Avenue. The principal could not prove that we weren’t, although almost every afternoon she drove down Ludlow Street to check that black people really were building a house in that section of town.
In September 1954, Donna began fourth grade, Jeanette third I second, and Linda kindergarten at Gregory School. The school was a block away from our grandparents’ house, and because Mommy was working as a maid for a Mrs. Egan in Red Bank, every afternoon at three we had to go to Nanna’s and stay there until Daddy picked us up at six.
Those three hours a day were the worst time of our lives. Nanna, whom we secretly referred to as the Wicked Witch of the East, would not allow us to play outdoors. Instead, we had to sit all in a row on a couch across the room from her big chair by the front window. While she watched the comings and goings on the street, we were permitted to do our homework but not to talk or move. If we crossed our legs, she snapped, “Stop that trickin’,” implying that we were masturbating, and—whack!—she reached out and hit us with a switch on the side of the head. If we worked up enough courage to clear our throats and whisper that we were hungry, she would grudgingly order us to get a piece of bread from the kitchen. The bread was invariably stale and the kitchen filthy because Nanna was too regal to do housework.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 3
