The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  When Daddy heard about this favoritism, he began our acquaintance with black-on-black prejudice, telling us about things like the paper-bag test—how being black doesn’t necessarily guarantee you entrance to a black affair; at the door you lay your hand on a brown paper bag and if your skin is darker than the bag, you’re turned away. “White, you’re all right; black, step back; brown, stick around,” was how it went, he said.

  I remember protesting, “But, Daddy, we can’t do anything about the color of our skin.”

  “That’s why I’m tellin’ you, you got to get smart,” he said. “When you’re grown, this society is gonna look at you as an ugly black female—not just white people but black people, too, are gonna see you that way—and the only thing that’s gonna get you above that is if you’re educated. Light-skinned people generally have everything given to them. They don’t have to bother ‘bout learnin’. But you are not light, so studyin’ is the only way I can see you gettin’ ahead of this.”

  When Daddy was through work on Sundays, he would take us to Asbury Park to have ice cream and walk on the boardwalk, but first he would drive up and down the streets and he and Mommy would point out people. “See that black woman wheeling that expensive baby carriage?” Mommy would say. “There’s a white baby in that carriage, and that’s what happens when you don’t have a diploma. You take care of white ladies’ children. You clean white ladies’ houses.”

  Daddy would say, “Look at that black lady sloppin’ along there in her turned-over shoes. She looks uneducated, don’t she? But now, vision her as a doctor. Vision her as shufflin’ along ‘cause she’s tired from being up all night savin’ a little baby’s life. She looks different, don’t she? She looks different ‘cause now you’re lookin’ at her with respect.”

  Again, Daddy would say, “See that white man crossin’ the street in his shiny shoes? He looks elegant, don’t he? He’s rich and he looks right through people like us. But s’pose a car comes barrelin’’ round that corner and hits him and he’s lyin’ there all hurt and bleedin’. Then s’pose a slimy green monkey runs over to him and says, ‘You’re hurt, you’re dying, I’m a doctor, I can save you.’ That rich, wealthy man would beg, ‘Please help me, Doctor,’ without even noticin’ he’s reachin’ out to a slimy green monkey. Same thing if that tired black lady in her turned-over shoes leans down to him and says, ‘I’m a doctor, I can help you.’ He’d grab her hand, no matter than if it was darker than ten paper bags, and he’d look up at her like a baby looks at his nursin’ mother ‘cause she’s somebody can keep him from dyin’.”

  Daddy made the scene so vivid that we stopped caring we weren’t cute and light-skinned and felt proud that we were going to be doctors and even rich white men would see us as angels. We listened to Daddy when he said: “When all you got goin’ for you is cuteness and then you get bags under your eyes, they forget about you and get someone younger. When all you can do is play basketball and you break your knee, they forget about you and give your place to someone else. But when what you got goin’ for you is inside your head, that’s something nobody can take away from you. Nobody. Ever. ‘Cept by killin’ you, and then it don’t matter no more ‘cause you’re dead.”

  Second-born Jeanette, the brightest and best of us, was quick to latch on to Daddy’s theme. “I’m gonna be a doctor,” she chanted. “I’m gonna be a doctor with a scripperscrap hangin’ ‘round my neck and everybody’ll grab my hand and love me.”

  “And call you Doc,” Daddy applauded.

  She savored the idea. “Doc. They’ll call me Doc.”

  “In fact, I’m gonna start callin’ you Doc right now,” Daddy proclaimed. We were all going to become doctors, but Jeanette was the one who was going to be a doctor beyond the shadow of a doubt. It’s unlikely that any of us wondered at this point if we could actually make it to becoming doctors, for we knew even less than Daddy about what it took to ascend to this exalted state, but if we did have misgivings about ourselves, we had no doubts about Jeanette. “Doc” she was, and doctor she would become.

  Curiously enough, though, it was Jeanette who came home one day with a C on a test. Prior to that, B was the lowest grade any of us had gotten, and even a B caused Mommy to shake her head and ask, “Did anyone in the class get an A? Then you can get an A, too. You just have to study harder.” But this time she looked at the C on Jeanette’s paper and said nothing. Wasn’t she going to lay into Jeanette? Was Doc so special that she could get away with anything? The rest of us were stunned. I, for one, resolved that if that’s the way it was going to be, I was darned if I was going to work so hard at studying from then on.

  Then Saturday came. Mommy roused Jeanette at 6:00 A.M., told her to dress in old clothes, and ordered her to the kitchen, where she handed Jeanette a bucket and scrub cloths. ‘‘You and I are going to clean the kitchen from top to bottom,” Mommy announced. “I’m going to teach you how to do it and do every bit of it right because that’s what you’re going to be doing for a living when you grow up.”

  Jeanette was outraged. “I’m going to be a doctor!”

  “Anybody who gets a C on a test is either too dumb or too lazy to be a doctor. You’re going to end up working in somebody’s kitchen, so you’d better know how to do it. Now, start by scouring the oven. And I want it spotless.”

  Neither tears nor argument moved Mommy; she remained stony, and for all of that day, Jeanette scrubbed the stove, the sink, the cupboards, the walls, the floor. Mommy was relentless. What was not done perfectly had to be done a second time, a third time.

  Jeanette’s hands grew raw and cracked. “Yes,” said Mommy inflexibly. “that’s what happens when you do cleaning.” Jeanette looked like pulled weeds and the rest of us were as meek as baby bunnies when Mommy lined us up on the living room couch at the end of the day.

  She surveyed us with all the usual softening lines absent from her face. ‘‘Your father works. I work,” she said slowly and emphatically. “The job you children have is to study. As long as you work at your job as hard as your father and I do at ours, we’ll take care of the house. We’ll do the cooking and the washing up and the cleaning. But if you don’t do your job, if you fool around or get lazy, then you’ll do the housework because that’s what you’ll be doing the rest of your life.”

  I looked at Jeanette’s cracked and bleeding hands, at her slumped, defeated posture. Right, I thought to myself. I get it. I’II study.

  Mommy had only one threat worse than that of becoming a cleaning woman, which was that we would be “shaking sheets at the Star Laundry” where she herself had once worked. She never failed to invoke the possibility of this hellish, if somewhat mysterious, fate when we drove past the establishment, just as she never failed to breathe heavily and conjure up the smiting hand of God when we drove past Monmouth Park Race Track. Gambling away good money was a sin, she declared, a sin with dire consequences, as she had searingly learned from her one experience with it.

  When she and Daddy were living in New York, Mommy had gone into a numbers parlor to play a combination she had dreamed about, and while she was there the police raided the place. She tried to chew up her ticket but her mouth was too dry to swallow it, and she was threatened with arrest. She trembled all over when she confessed her sin to Daddy, and something of that same trembling emotion crept into her voice each time we passed the entrance to the track and she sounded her warning against going in. When I did finally go to the races one day twenty years later, goaded into it by a teasing remark that I was surely no longer under my mother’s sway, I found that I was miserably uneasy every moment, quite certain that a horse would stampede, the grandstand collapse, or a madman shoot up the place, aiming the first bullet at me.

  Teachers say: Give me a child at an impressionable age, and she’s mine for the rest of her life. I gladly suspect that I am Mommy’s and Daddy’s for all of my life, for I am forty-seven now and not only can I not comfortably go to a race track but the other night in a restaurant, asked to w
ait in the bar until our table was ready. I was the only one in the party who didn’t perch on a bar stool. Couldn’t. Mommy had proclaimed, “Ladies do not sit on bar stools.”

  Such injunctions were burned into us, for Mommy felt strongly about proper behavior; about sitting with a straight back, knees together, legs crossed at the ankle; about walking with shoulders back, head high. “A person meeting you for the first time judges you by how you walk, how you speak, and how you’re dressed,” she told us. On our Sunday excursions to Asbury Park, she would watch for an example of what she called “a black walk,” “See that?” she’d say. “I don’t know that man from Adam, but I can tell from his walk he’s stupid, dumb, a no account.” Then she’d point to another man. “I don’t know him either, but that’s an educated person. His back’s straight, he’s walking straight, not slumping and slouching and oozing along.”

  She had us walk up and down the hall at home with books on our heads, all the while giving us instructions: “Always enter a room with your head up. Right away that tells people you’re your own person. If your head is down, that lets people feel they can do anything they want with you. When you talk to somebody, white or colored, always look him straight in the eye. First of all, it’s honesty. Second, he knows he can beat up on you if you don’t make eye contact.”

  According to Mommy, not looking somebody in the eye, not having a strong handshake, and not holding your head up were character flaws. “But you have to be a lady,” she always summed up. A lady never enters a room without saying “Good morning,” and never leaves without a “Goodbye” to all present. A lady always speaks to inferiors just as readily and cordially as to superiors. A lady is never loud or obstreperous. These were articles of faith to Mommy, and she passed them on to us as if they were written on tablets of stone.

  Because she was our mother and children assume a parent knows the ways of the world, it didn’t occur to us to question where she had learned the commandments she was passing on to us, but I think back now and realize that it was extremely unlikely that she had gleaned them as a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia, only slightly less unlikely that she’d acquired them scouring cauldrons at Bluefield State Teachers College. I think she must have absorbed most of her ideas about etiquette, behavior, and the correct way of doing things from her white employer, Mrs. Egan.

  Mrs. Egan, who had a large and lovely house in New Shrews- bury, New Jersey, an opulent town north of Long Branch, taught Mommy that forks go on the left, knives on the right; that you serve from the left and take away from the right; that when a fork is turned over on the dinner plate, the person has finished eating; that when a cup is turned over, the guest doesn’t wish coffee and is to be asked if he or she would prefer tea. Mommy passed this information on to us. We even had some elegant things to practice setting a table with, for when a piece of china or crystal became chipped, Mrs. Egan gave it to Mommy. Our cutlery was the cheapest that could be bought in the dime store, but we acquired a sense that finer things existed from the sight and feel of Mrs. Egan’s chipped etched goblets and bone-china dishes.

  Along with the finer things, Mommy also brought Mrs. Egan’s stale marshmallows home for us to eat. It struck us as odd when people remarked that a pillow was as soft as marshmallows or puffy clouds looked like marshmallows. Marshmallows, in our experience, were rock-hard and crunchy; delicious but you wouldn’t want to rest your head on them. Not until we were grown did we become acquainted with their true nature.

  Nor with the true nature of orange juice. Daddy diluted one small container of frozen orange juice with a gallon of water to stretch it into enough for all of us. When I finally tasted orange juice as it should be, I thought it was quite awful, rather like drinking almond extract.

  Mommy cooked for birthdays and holidays, but Daddy did the everyday cooking. He liked to, I think, but also he probably felt that he coped better with the bargain chickens and meat than Mommy did. “So long as they make food,” he used to say, “they’ll make expensive cuts and what’s left’ll be cheap, and I can make the cheap cuts taste just as good as the expensive.” None of us, so far as I remember, ever got sick from eating the overage food. In fact, we seldom fell ill from any cause. If we did develop a fever or come down with a cold, we weren’t taken to a doctor. Daddy had his heart set on our becoming physicians, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with the medical profession in the meantime because it swallowed up dollar bills.

  “Get the doctor book,” Daddy would tell Mommy when she greeted his homecoming with the news that a child was in bed. He would feel a fevered forehead. “High temperature—what do it say?”

  “Musterole and aspirin,” she would read from the home medical encyclopedia.

  “Musterole and aspirin is what the book says? Okay, then that’s what we gotta do.”

  On the night Daddy came home and found the sick child looking a little less peaked, he would gently suggest, “You want Daddy to fix you some nice fruit salad and maybe a nice piece of cake?” If the tempted child agreed that she could manage to choke down these treats, Daddy would sit by the bed until the last piece of fruit had been swallowed, the last cake crumb picked up on a moistened finger, then he’d roar, “Okay, you’re well! Get outta that bed!”

  Home doctoring didn’t extend to home dentistry, except for baby teeth, which Daddy extracted in the time-honored way by looping strong thread around the loose tooth, tying the other end to a doorknob, and then slamming the door shut. Linda, when she was four or five, having seen Daddy perform this operation on us older ones, undertook it for herself, bravely and successfully, which so impressed the rest of us that we immediately predicted she was destined to be a dentist when she grew up. After establishing that dentists also have Dr. prefacing their names, she complacently agreed.

  We were conscious of dentists because of Mommy’s and Daddy’s troubles with teeth. Both of them had more false than real ones in their mouths. Mommy lost her teeth through neglect, the common treatment for an aching tooth in East Beckley, West Virginia, being not to fill the tooth but to “treat it with cold steel,” i.e., to pull it, and Daddy lost his because of his malocclusion. Of the five of us, Jeanette and I inherited Daddy’s jaw structure, and since he was determined for us not to be dentally crippled as he was, he managed to materialize money enough for us to have teeth pulled and teeth added to align our bites so that the rest of our teeth would not drift, loosen, and fall out. About the time we needed this work, the brother of the owner of a garment sweatshop where Mommy worked as a presser graduated from dental school, so Daddy was able to arrange for a bargain rate.

  Mommy’s and Daddy’s teeth, no matter how long and how often they soaked them in Polident, never gleamed whitely, for they were dedicated, devoted, enthusiastic smokers. Daddy came home in the morning from his all-night job, and before he went off to his day job, he and Mommy sat drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while we kids ate breakfast and got ready for school. This was, in effect, our family roundtable talk time. Problems with schoolwork, that was Mommy’s department, but problems with people, that’s where Daddy held forth.

  “Daddy,” I said one morning, “a boy at school called me a thick-lipped bitch.”

  “‘I’ll tell you what, Cookie,” he advised. “When somebody says somethin’ mean to you like that, you tell him thank you very much.”

  “I’m supposed to thank him? He isn’t doing me any favor!”

  “But you don’t want him to know that. You want to confuse him. He’s said somethin’ that’s s’posed to make you feel bad, and you say thank you very much, now he don’t know what to do. He might try it once more jus’ to make sure he understood you right, but when it still don’t work to rile you, he’s gonna give up and leave you alone.”

  He added, to drive his point home, “You never want to let nobody know they’ve pushed your buttons ‘cause once they know they can do it, they’ll keep doin’ it. But if you don’t ever let them know you even got buttons, that’s it
, that’s all. There ain’t nothin’ they can do.”

  Daddy made everything into an object lesson—even the death of our much-loved dog, Butch, a German spitz who had been with us at Garfield Court and Seaview Manor and now at 174 Ludlow Street. Usually Butch was companionably in the midst of wherever we were, but one day we heard the screech of brakes and the heart-sinking howls of a badly injured dog. The truck driver had tried to stop and Butch had tried to scoot from under the wheels, but he hadn’t quite made it; his pelvis was smashed.

  “See,” Daddy said a couple of days later at the breakfast table when our grief had become a little more manageable, “it’s like I tell you, hormones is trouble. Butch went runnin’ after that female dog across the street and got hisself killed. Same thing with men and women. When they get to runnin’ after that taste of honey, they get themselves in trouble. Lotsa trouble.”

  Listening, I imagined myself crushed and bleeding like Butch if hormones got me to running after a boy.

  Mommy, as determined as Daddy to vaccinate us against becoming dropouts at fifteen, added her own dark view. “Boys get girls pregnant, and what’s the difference to them? It’s no difference to them, but the girl’s life is over. All the lovely things you were going to do, all the wonderful things you were going to learn, all the exciting places you were going to go, there’s none of that now. Your life as you know it is ended. The only time it makes any sense to get pregnant is when you can tell yourself that if you died the next day, you’ve already done most everything you wanted to do.”

  Hearing this made us feel a little bit as though we had ruined Mommy’s life. “Mommy,” we said, “don’t you love us? Don’t you like having us?”

  “It’s not that I don’t love you,” she said. “I just want you to understand that your life changes when you have kids, so you’ve got to decide when it’s okay for it to change, not let some boy talk you into a taste of honey when it’s not to your advantage.”