The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  “Boys don’t care you’re gonna be doctors,” Daddy followed up. “They’re lookin’ out for what they want, so you gotta be lookin’ out for what you want.”

  Sometimes Jeanette would buck whatever it was Daddy was trying to teach us by quoting a friend or teacher, “Well, so-and-so said we should do this or so-and-so said we shouldn’t be doing that,” which didn’t go down well with Daddy.

  “Doc,” he would say, “you look in the mailbox on your way to school and see if there’s a certified check in there to pay for your food and the nap you’re wearin’ off the carpets in this house. If there is, you bring it to me and I’ll listen to the person who’s got his name on that check about how to raise my kids.”

  What Daddy hated most was the possibility that we might hear from other people that because we were black, we daren’t dream, mustn’t plan to go places, shouldn’t bother to study, because how much do you have to know to clean houses and dig ditches? “I don’t want no one dilutin’ the message,” he told Mommy, who had more of a sense of us as children and would have let us go to the playground to rollerskate and play ball. Daddy would have none of it. “There’s five of them,” he argued. “They can play with each other. What do they need to go outside the family for?” He wanted us to look only to each other for help and companionship. “If we stick together,” he said over and over, “there’s nothin’ this family can’t do.”

  If we stick together … and, he might well have added, if you do what I say, for that was the implication: that we should listen to and be guided by him. If we didn’t, trouble was quick to follow, almost as if he had planned it. Like the time we went to the beach. Neither Mommy nor Daddy could swim and we were under strict orders nor to go in the water, but Jeanette, being Jeanette, defied the ban. Venturing into the surf up to her knees, she came screeching out, stung by a jellyfish and with a crab clamped on her big toe. Incidents like this made Daddy seem prescient and kept the rest of us enthusiastically in line.

  One morning Jeanette, bucking Daddy on some point, hit on the argument probably every child in the world has used against his or her parents: “I didn’t ask to be born.”

  Daddy had an answer for it. “I know you didn’t ask to be born, honey, and as your father responsible for gettin’ you into the world, I owe you somethin’. I owe you three hots and a cot, which is to say, I owe you three meals a day and a place to sleep. That’s what I’m obliged for, and that’s what I’m lookin’ to see you get.” He nodded several times, overcome by the seriousness of his obligation, then leaned back in his chair with a curl to his mouth like a villain’s mustache. “Course, nobody says the meals has got to be chicken. S’pose I just give you bread and water? An’ s’pose I let you sleep on the floor?”

  “No, Daddy!”

  “That’s all I’m obliged for, honey. Everything else is gratis. Everything else I do for you is ‘cause I want to, not ‘cause I have to.”

  For days afterward, because Daddy had a tenacious mind of the sort that doesn’t easily turn loose one idea and go on to another, he would set a plate in front of Jeanette with, “See, I ain’t obliged to give you this. I could give you bread and water and soup with just a little bit of fat floatin’ in it, just to keep you alive. That’s all I’m asked to give you. But you get more, right? You get this nice plateful, and I imagine when it comes to dessert, you’ll have some of that, will you? All right, dessert, and all the other good stuff. But just remember, the good stuff I do for you is because I want to, because I’m your daddy and I love you and I want to, not because I have to.”

  The subtext to this was that it was not enough for us, the children, to behave in minimal ways either, that filial respect and dutifulness might be all that was basically required of us, but the good stuff, like doing well in school and sticking together as a family and paying attention to what Mommy and Daddy were trying to teach us, we would do because we loved them and wanted them to love us.

  Perhaps because Donna and Jeanette were paired, and Linda and Rita were paired, and I was just sort of in the middle by myself, I was particularly anxious for love and approval from Mommy and Daddy. It occurred to me, as it had to Jeanette, that playing a musical instrument was a way to ensure their attention. Donna, progressing in her lessons, had set her heart on a larger and deeper-toned tenor sax, and when Daddy finally managed to buy her one, I begged for the old alto sax.

  “You, Cookie? You ain’t but five. You can barely breathe, honey, let alone blow in that horn.”

  “Yes, I can, Daddy. I can blow it.” The sax was too heavy for me to hold, but I got it braced on a chair, then I blew. And blew. And blew. I blew so hard that I passed out. When I came to, Daddy allowed as how he had been planning to sell the horn, but okay, I could have it and he would figure out a way for me to go to Mr. Winthrop for lessons, too.

  So, that was three of us studying music. Daddy and I reminisced about it years later: “I didn’t want to see those horns go up in the attic after I spent for them and the lessons, so the challenge went like this: if Donna got me a nice song and I praised it, then you, Cookie, the next day, you can bet you had a nice song for me, too, because you wanted the same praise.

  “Now we got two horns and a guitar goin’ in the house, and to be honest with you, Cookie, sometimes the noise would drive me nuts. I’d go into the living room where you was practicin’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, that was so nice. Daddy loved it,’ then I’d go down to the kitchen and say, ‘Oh, God, it’s driving me insane.’ I’m talkin’ ‘bout the time you thought you had learned how to blow the horn but the only thing that was gettin’ out was noise. You knew how to set your lips to get a big sound, and you got it, never mind whether it was in the right key or not. But I knew you were young and it would come.”

  From the beginning, Daddy was against our learning to play by ear. He wanted us to learn to read music, be taught theory, and acquire such a solid foundation that we would be able to play jazz, which he loved. As we got better, he began looking for teachers beyond Mr. Winthrop. The 389th Army band, staffed with skilled musicians and good enough to be called on to play at the White House, was stationed at Fort Monmouth. Daddy took to hanging around the servicemen’s club when members of the band played for dances.

  He stood off to the side of the bandstand and watched and listened. “I picked out who I thought played the best. I’d go up to the fellow and say, ‘I got three little girls learnin’ music. Could you come over to my house and teach them ‘cause I don’t want them to learn by ear?’ Like, I picked out this guy—he played the guitar and it sounded so sweet and full of life—and I asked him and he said, ‘Sure, where do you live?’ I told him Long Branch and offered to pay him three dollars an hour, which he said was all right. He was the kind of person that didn’t watch the time, which I liked, and whenever Jeanette asked him something, he never said, ‘We’ll get to that later, not now, you’re too young,’ so that gave her a good edge and she played very, very good.

  “I always made sure Tass was there or I was there for the lessons so that what the guy said one of you girls was weak on, we would know. Kids want to please you, so if we’d sent you to the music studio, you’d have come home and told us the man said you played great. This way, we heard it when the man said, ‘Donna, you gotta be stronger on your …’ whatever. When he comes back again, we’re sittin’ there again, and he says, ‘No, I told you last week you gotta …’ Now Donna knows I’ve heard this twice and it’s costin’ me three dollars, and she’s gonna make sure I don’t hear it one more time.”

  As soon as I got far enough along on the alto sax, Donna, Jeanette, and I began playing together. “They’re good,” one of the army musicians eventually told Daddy. “You wouldn’t know it was little girls playing. But they need a rhythm section.”

  Daddy thought this over. “Linda’s five now and she likes to beat up on things,” he mused. “Maybe I can get her goin’ on drums.”

  Daddy got hold of drumsticks and a rubber pad and hired a soldi
er-drummer to teach her. Linda learned the right way, not the lazy way of holding both sticks between thumb and fingers like a hammer, but, rather, by laying the left stick easy between the index and middle fingers and letting it rest against the thumb. Linda quickly mastered the paradiddle, a type of drum roll. The instructor was impressed. Daddy asked if she was promising enough for him to go into hock for a trap set, and when the instructor said she was, back he went to Mr. Moss with the war memorabilia, which had been redeemed, pawned again for Donna’s tenor sax, and redeemed again. Now the money went down the street to Mr. Scott for a drum set.

  With Linda playing drums to provide the rhythm, with the guys from the Army band treating us not like kids but like real musicians, somewhere in that time there came into being the concept of our being a band. There is something special about people closely related by blood playing or singing together, like the Lennon Sisters or the Mills Brothers, and that wordless communication made the music sound better than anything we could have produced alone, while the sense of being in sync made us enjoy practicing. We didn’t mind that Daddy didn’t want us to run with other kids. Our world became exclusively study and practice, and we loved it.

  Did Daddy plan it that way so that our attention would be turned inward to the family and our satisfactions would come from each other? Like most things in life, it was probably some planning and some happenstance: the happenstance of a little red saxophone in a Cracker Jack box; then his seeing a way of capitalizing on Donna’s interest to pull the rest of us into a shared, absorbing, and rewarding pursuit, and his keeping it going by making sure we had praise and rewards, encouraging words and ice cream.

  Did he anticipate that music making might someday pay the tolls on the road to our becoming doctors? I think not. Daddy was on such unknown terrain that, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, he simply used whatever came to hand to help him in his blind but determined quest to equip us to build better lives for ourselves.

  4

  The Thornettes

  A LIFE PIVOTS ON INCIDENTS. Aunt Gloria, one of Daddy’s older sisters, trained as a nurse at Monmouth Memorial Hospital in Long Branch, and when I was eight, she took me on a visit there. We were in an elevator and a woman with a huge belly got on. She seemed to me to be fat in an unusual way, and I was staring at her when suddenly she screamed, squatted on the floor, and a bloody creature dropped from under her skirt. The creature looked like an animal but not like an animal. It started to cry, and I whispered to Aunt Gloria, “I think it’s a baby.”

  The elevator doors opened, and hospital personnel rushed in and whisked mother and child away. Wow, I thought to myself, she got on the elevator one person and got off two people. At that moment I knew that was what I wanted to do when I became a doctor: I wanted to deliver babies. I didn’t know the word obstetrician. I had never heard of a “maternity ward.” How babies were delivered was unknown to me. I simply knew that I wanted to be present when one person became two.

  Why did Aunt Gloria take me to the hospital that day? I cannot imagine, for we seldom saw her. Donald’s relatives took little interest in Donald’s children. He was the only one of all his brothers and sisters to marry young; the others were in their late twenties before they managed to wobble out of Nanna’s orbit long enough to take a spouse, and we were teenagers before a single cousin was born.

  Sometimes an aunt dressed in her Sunday finest would stop by, and later Daddy would say, “She’s just showin’ off. Don’t worry about it. You might have a little hole in your dress here, a little patch on your sleeve there, but you’re clean.” And he would go on to turn the visit into one of his lessons for us.

  “She’s comin’ over here all dressed up and she don’t even bring you so much as a piece of chalk for a present. Now, what does that tell you? She ain’t comin’ over here to see you; she’s comin’ over here for you to see her.” Then he would tell us: “Don’t listen to what people say. Look at what they do. When these same people come to you later on when you’re grown up and ask for your advice, don’t deny them. Just remember that when they had the chance to be nice and give you things, they didn’t do it. I don’t want you to hold any sort of hostility. Malice wears you down. It makes you evil. It wastes your time that you could be doin’ something positive with. But it don’t hurt to remember back.”

  Sometimes when we were out driving, we would see the shades up at an aunt or uncle’s house, but when Daddy tooted the horn, the shades slowly descended. We knew they were saying, “Oh-oh, here come Donald and his six splits.”

  “They’re home but they don’t want us to see them,” Daddy said. ‘“That’s okay. We’ll go for a ride and I’ll buy ice cream for everybody. Don’t worry about these small-minded people. You’ll show them when you grow up.”

  If it happened to be around New Year’s, we knew for sure that no one would welcome us because in the black subculture there was, and still is, a superstition that if a female crosses your threshold first, you’ll have bad luck the rest of the year. Even though Daddy could have gone through the door before us, the relatives were not likely to take a chance. Nor did we see them at Christmastime. “You’d think they could at least bring the kids a little toy or a set of jacks from the ten-cent store,” Mommy and Daddy said to each other every year. But the relatives never did.

  Because our family had so little money for Christmas presents, we would each draw a name and buy one sister a present, and all of us kids would go together on a gift for Mommy and Daddy. With Mommy it was okay; we could get her Evening in Paris perfume or Sweet Pea cologne from Woolworth’s. But Daddy was difficult, We couldn’t buy him aftershave lotion because he didn’t have a beard. He said it was because he had Indian blood, just like Mommy, and Indians don’t have facial hair, or so little that it isn’t worth shaving.

  For Christmas decorations we would string popcorn and wrap empty shoe boxes in colored paper with ribbons and bows. After dinner on Christmas Eve, when most Christmas tree sellers were about to close up, Daddy would go downtown and get a tree for next to nothing. He would bring home this scraggly, picked-over tree that nobody had wanted. We would set it up, and miraculously, after Mommy decorated it with bubble lights, ornaments, and a star on top, it was transformed into something beautiful. We would arrange the empty boxes under it so it looked like there were lots and lots of presents.

  Once somebody came to the house after Christmas and was curious about why we hadn’t opened all our gifts. We improvised desperately. “Oh, they’re for relatives coming up from the South,” we said. “Way down South. They won’t be here for days yet.”

  We couldn’t use our allowances to buy gifts because we didn’t have any. “Allowances?’” said Mommy blankly when we suggested them. “What’s allowances?” We made do, instead, by collecting bottle money. In those days there was a two-cent deposit on Coke and Pepsi bottles and a five-cent deposit on large ginger ale bottles. We pounced on the empties whenever we spotted them in gutters and weedy vacant lots and trundled them in a little wagon to the candy store on the corner. The returns provided our pocket money and money for the collection plate at the Second Baptist church.

  After the “Little Miss Sunshine” incident, Mommy decided we would bypass Sunday School and attend the regular service with her. Because the minister had a captive audience, his sermons—frequently interrupted by shouts of “Yes, Lord!” and “Oh, Jesus, I’ve got the spirit!”—tended to go on and on. We were often restless and bored, but we behaved in a thoroughly disciplined fashion, neither playing with the fans with the names of funeral parlors printed on them nor whispering to each other nor kicking the pew in front of us, because we had done all of these things the first time Mommy took us to church and when we got home, she had given us the whipping of our lives.

  “House of God!” she roared, lashing at us with a broken, hard-rubber belt from her sewing machine. “House of God and you’re kicking and whispering and fooling around” Next time you’ll be quiet!” Whomp. “Next time w
hen the minister’s talking, you’ll be still!” Whomp. And whomp again, And again—the hard rubber raising welts wherever it landed.

  She was right: next time, and every time thereafter, she had only to look at us with one eyebrow slightly raised, and no matter how hot it got and how furiously the funeral parlor fans waved, we never moved through all the amens and announcements of the arrival of the spirit.

  So confident was Mommy of our behavior after that one whipping that she sometimes sent us to church alone. It was on one such occasion that the Reverend Williams descended upon us after the service and ordered us to stand over to the side until the rest of the congregation had filed out. “Are you putting pennies in the collection plate?” he demanded.

  We looked to Jeanette to answer him. “It’s our bottle money,” she said, and started to explain how we collected it.

  “We don’t take pennies!” the reverend thundered.

  Chagrined and shamed, we ran home with this news. Daddy exploded. “Tass, I told ya! These kids work hard to put together their pennies, an’ he don’t want ‘em. He don’t want ‘em!”

  That was the last time we went to the Second Baptist church, but not the last dealings we had with the Reverend C. P. Williams. Several years later, in 1961, Nanna died. She had been ill with diabetes for a long time and had made Betty, the foster child she was supposed to be caring for, leave school to take care of her, to sit by her bed for hours massaging her feet, and to cook and clean and be a slavey for the aunts and uncles. It distressed Daddy, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He had always had a soft spot for Betty and felt protective toward her ever since a time when he had taken his mother and Betty to Asbury Park to see Betty’s mother. He told me about it years later.