The Ditchdigger's Daughters

by Dr. Yvonne S. Thornton

  We went back the next Wednesday and won again. And the next. The third time we won, we were saying, “Okay, this is it. One more time and we’ll have a week with the stars.”

  “And” Mommy predicted, “they’ll be running down the aisles with the cameras from Life magazine and Time, like the night Ella Fitzgerald won.”

  On the Tuesday before the Wednesday of the fourth week, Daddy got a call from the manager of the Apollo Theatre. “It’s not gonna be four weeks,” he said. “It’s gotta be six weeks.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Daddy protested. “It’s been four weeks ever since I was a kid.”

  “The rules have been changed,” the man told him and hung up.

  Daddy raged, but Mommy said, “We’ll show him, Donald. We’ll go our there and win six times. Then they’ll really be runnin' down the aisles with the flashbulbs poppin’.”

  We won the fourth week.

  We won the fifth week.

  The sixth week they brought in another band to play against us. That band went on first and they were good, so good that we whispered to each other in dismay that they were surely professionals. The applause for them was thunderous. Backstage we stacked our hands, not touching, concentrated, broke away, and ran out onstage. We played—oh, my, how we played that night. And we won! Six Wednesday nights in a row at the Apollo! In front of the toughest audience in show business!

  But where were the flashbulbs? Where were the reporters racing down the aisles? Those days were over, it seemed.

  More important, where was our contract for a week with the stars? Frank Schiffman and his son Bobby owned the theater. “You don’t have a week,” they said. “That was only verbal. There’s nothing in writing.”

  Daddy was in shock. An honest person himself, he assumed other people were honest and couldn’t believe the Schiffmans were telling him that because there was nothing in writing, they weren’t going to book the Thornton Sisters for a week’s engagement. “It’s not right,” he kept saying. “We worked too hard. First it was four weeks and we won. Then it was six weeks and we won. We’ve earned our paid week with the stars.”

  My dad, a black man, a ditchdigger, a laborer, a janitor, went out and hired a lawyer. That was the first time I saw my father fight, fight in the way that people with money fight. We’d been wronged and he was not going to say, Yassuh, massa, that’s all right, we’ll go someplace else. He said, “It’s wrong to do this. Especially to my kids.” Ira J. Katchen, our white attorney, agreed, and based his brief on the argument that even though there was no written agreement, the prize of a week’s engagement on the regular bill was a long tradition, well known far and wide.

  At the end of a year and a half, the Schiffmans settled out of court and scheduled the band for a week in October 1961. “Naw,” Daddy told them, “the week’s gotta be in summer. I’m not takin’ my kids outta school.”

  Daddy drew the moral for us. “Don’t back off from people because they’re white and we’re black. What’s right is right.” We never knew why the Schiffmans didn’t want us. Because we were kids? Because at Daddy’s insistence we wore such cover-up, schoolgirl outfits? Most likely it was because there were five of us and the rules of Local 802 of the musicians’ union stipulated they had to pay five salaries instead of the one they would pay for a single’s act.

  By the time we played our week at the Apollo, Donna was seventeen, Jeanette sixteen, I thirteen, Linda eleven, and Rita nine. Rita, who had been too young to play the Amateur Nights with us, now came in on piano, so the Schiffmans were actually getting one more Thornton sister than they were paying for. And Jeanette put a stop to the little-girl outfits.

  We were on the bill at the Apollo with Fats Domino singing ‘I’m Walkin’,” Dee Clark singing his hit record, “Raindrops,” Carla Thomas singing “Gee Whiz,” Phil Upchurch playing “The Happy Organ,” Ernie K. Doe singing “Mother-in-Law,” and Shep and the Limelights singing their hit, “Daddy’s Home.” It was the year of A-line dresses and spaghetti straps, and Jeanette persuaded Mommy that that’s what we should wear for a gig at the Apollo.

  “Spaghetti straps!” Daddy screamed. “Not my daughters!” Mommy finally brought him around, and forever after “spaghetti straps” was our code phrase for whatever Daddy disapproved of in the way of outfits.

  We played thirty-one shows that week at the Apollo, and we loved it. Once the limelight hits, it is as though it changes your whole molecular structure. You’re never the same again. The applause, the adulation make it almost impossible to go back to being the nobody you were before.

  Daddy wouldn’t let us leave the theater between shows—no running around 125th Street—but we could go out in the lobby and look at the pictures of the Thornton Sisters taken by J.J. Kriegsmann, “Photographer of the Stars.” Black or white, every star had photos by J. J. Kriegsmann. The marquee didn’t blaze out THE THORNTON SISTERS, but if our name wasn’t up in lights, our faces were in the lobby and we felt like we were it.

  For Daddy, being at the Apollo was like recapturing part of his youth, and for Mommy it was the fulfillment of the dream she and her sister Ellie had had when they came north. Her eyes sparkled and danced while she was onstage playing the bass. As for us, we were having the time of our lives, and there was great, great esprit de corps, a sense of solidarity and love among the sisters. Of course, we said things like, “Who stole my slip?” but accusations didn’t lead to raised voices. Mommy had never allowed any quarreling, no hitting, no saying, “I hate you!”

  “Strangers do that. You don’t do that in the family,” was something she had always made perfectly clear to us. “Each of you is part Daddy, part Mommy, so that really makes you closer to each other than I am to your father because you are bound by blood.” If one of us struck another, she came in and hit both of us. It convinced me that in families where a child says, “I hate my brother” or “I can’t stand my sister,” it is because the parents did not put a stop to bickering and battering in the very beginning before it escalated to hating.

  That year we played the Apollo was the year Donna graduated from high school. She yearned desperately to go to the senior prom, but Daddy had never allowed her to go out on a date. She had no boyfriend, and there was no one to take her. When he became aware of just how unhappy Donna felt about missing the dance, Daddy told Mommy to design Donna an evening gown and he would ask a soldier from Fort Monmouth to escort her.

  The prospect of Donna going out with a fellow prompted Daddy to embark on one of his soliloquies over morning coffee at the round table. “This neighborhood is just waitin’ for the Thornton girls to get into trouble, to come home pregnant. Oh, that would be really juicy. Oh, wouldn’t they like that. Niggers are like crabs in a basket. Let me tell you somethin’, you have all these crabs in a basket and they’re okay, jus’ millin’ around aimless, until one crab decides he wants to go up the side and try to get out of the basket. Then, all of a sudden, the other crabs who was doin’ nothin’ rush to that side of the basket and start pullin’ him down.”

  Years later I was in a Maryland market and spotted a basket of softshell crabs. I stood and watched and, sure enough, one of the crabs started climbing up the side and the others scrambled over and pulled it down. So, Daddy’s words were literally true. He said that’s how black people are. “They see somebody tryin’ to rise up and they tell bad things about you, they talk behind your back. If you’re a nice-looking girl, they try to get their sons to date you and lead you out of the path you’re follow in’. There are always people who want to pull you down. It’s human nature. You have to make sure you know that’s what’s gonna be happenin’ and plan so it don’t happen to you.”

  Daddy hammered into us the belief that women can do anything, that they are brighter than men, and then he turned around and called us stupid. “You stupid women,” he excoriated us. “Women are stupid emotionally. You can’t help yourselves because God made you that way. Women are to have kids. Men are to run around. That’s the
natural order of things. You’re not gonna change that, so you have to select the time you’re gonna be stupid. In every hour there’s about three seconds that you’re weak. For fifty-nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds you can be strong. The boy’s kissin’ your ear and he’s doin’ this and that and you can be strong, but for three seconds you’re weak. The next hour that three seconds becomes six seconds. If you’re on a date for three hours, that’s nine seconds that you’re weak, and the fella zooms in and gets you. You can’t help yourselves. God made you that way. But you can select the right time to be stupid, and that’s what you gotta do. You gotta pick the time.”

  He described kissing to us as “swapping spit,” which made it sound disgusting, but at the same time we had an idealized, romantic vision of being kissed by a boy and we couldn’t wait for Donna to get home from the senior prom and give us a moment by moment description of what it was like. We hadn’t reckoned on Daddy, however. As Donna was being escorted up the front walk by her date, the porch light snapped on and there stood Daddy in his boxer shorts. There was to be no kiss for Donna.

  For days Donna talked about how handsome the soldier was, what a fine dancer, what a polite and well-mannered man. She was starry-eyed with the pleasurable wonderment of having been in a man’s company and arms. “He liked me. He really liked me,” she mooned. “I’m sure he’s going to ask me out again .” So often did she say the soldier this, the soldier that, that Daddy grew impatient.

  “That soldier didn’t do nothin’ without his gettin’ paid,” he snapped.

  “No!” Donna protested. “He’d never accept money for taking me out.”

  “How do you know what he’d never do? You’re so smart, look at this.” Daddy pulled out the box where he kept his papers and thrust a canceled check under Donna’s nose. “That’s his name, ain’t it? That’s what I paid him. I hired him and I paid him, and I ain’t hirin’ him to take you out again so you can just stop talkin’ about him.”

  Donna was crushed. Only the excitement of starting her first job eased her past this blow. Rather than go directly on to college, she and Daddy decided she would work for a year until Jeanette graduated and then the two of them would go to college together. In the meantime, we had signed a recording contract with Roulette Records. Rhythm and blues had come on the scene—Ike and Tina Turner, the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Ronettes—and the band plunged into that kind of music.

  There was the Top Ten, and then there was the black Top Ten.

  If a manager thought one of the black songs had potential, he would give it to a white artist. That’s what happened with many of what are now thought of as Elvis Presley songs. Elvis was the “cover” for a number of black songs. Because he was white, the song would get wider play and go over bigger, and everybody except the black artist made more money.

  “Tutti Frutti” was one such song. First recorded by Little Richard, it became a big hit when it was covered by Pat Boone. Even when a hit recording happened to be by a black artist, unless the artist was as famous as Ella Fitzgerald or Duke Ellington, the black face was not on the record jacket. Instead, the jacket illustration would be of moonlight or the ocean or mountains, or if it was a black group, there would be little white cartoon figures.

  The first recording we made for Roulette was “Doin’ the Waddle,” which was supposed to be a new dance. It was also the last record we made for them. They tried to send us on tour to promote the record and Daddy would have none of it. “My daughters stay in school,” he informed Roulette.

  “You’ve got a contract,” he was told.

  “Nothin’ in that contract says I gotta take my daughters outta school, so you can just rip it up.”

  And they did.

  Atlantic Records then signed us as a novelty group, but Daddy again vetoed traveling to promote a record, so that contract was dissolved as well.

  I had no regrets about any of this because an incident in my freshman year in high school validated my belief that I was going to become a doctor. My biology teacher, Rollo Galbraith, was a tough taskmaster, but he softened enough one day to comment that he had never seen any student take such voluminous notes as I did.

  “It’s because I love your class, Mr. Galbraith ,” I told him. “I really like biology. I want to be a doctor.”

  He looked surprised, maybe because the only black girl in his class was the student who was aiming highest. “A doctor?”

  “Yes. I want to deliver babies. I want to be an obstetrician.”

  A few nights later, after dinner, a car we didn’t recognize pulled into our driveway and a man got out and rang the doorbell. I switched on the porch light. “Mr. Galbraith!” I exclaimed, startled.

  He asked me come out to his car, where he opened the trunk and gestured to boxes of books. “These are obstetrical textbooks and journals I inherited from my uncle,” he said. “I thought you might like to have them, Yvonne.”

  He helped me carry the boxes into the house and expressed the hope that the books would be useful to me in studying to become an obstetrician. I was overwhelmed. It was a gesture that carried a world of meaning for me. It said: Here is a white man, a teacher, who takes you seriously, who believes you can reach your goal.

  I thanked him for his gift. And my heart thanked him for his far greater gift: his faith in my ability. From that moment on, I never doubted that I was going to become a doctor, that someday I would be an obstetrician.

  6

  Weekend Dates

  “DADDY, PLEASE!”

  “What do you wanna go out there for?”

  “So we can get mobbed like the other performers. So we can sign autographs and give interviews.”

  We were in our dressing room at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre, and on the street below kids swarmed behind barricades in a line snaking around the block. We longed to appear among them and be treated like celebrities. Daddy threw us a disdainful look, draped a towel over his head, and saying, “Watch this,” strolled over to the window. He stood there with his arms outstretched like a winning prizefighter and in a loud baritone began to sing: “I keep forgettin’ you don’t love me no more.” Down below, a teenager screamed, a sea of faces turned upward, and the mob surged toward the building, wailing, “Chuckie! Chuckie!” They thought Daddy was Chuck Jackson, the idol of black teenagers that summer of 1962.

  Daddy moved away from the window. “See that, those heifers down there will scream at anybody. The screamin’s worth nothin’!”

  A disc jockey known as Murray the K had booked us for a week’s summer spectacular at the Brooklyn Fox, an annual event known as Murray the K and His Swingin' Soirée. It was a class show. On the bill were the Four Seasons, the Crystals, Tommy Roe, Fabian, and Chuck Jackson. And the Thornton Sisters, this time on the marquee. We weren’t famous yet but we were getting known because Murray the K had been plugging our recording of “Wild Childhood” several times a day on his radio show.

  With everyone else on the bill performing their number-one hits, we felt that we shouldn’t just be playing an instrumental, and Daddy gave in, agreeing that the Contours’ Top Ten record called “Do You love Me?” was a better choice.

  When it was our turn to go on, Linda, on the drums, was already seated onstage, then the rest of us twirled out and Donna said, “You broke my heart ‘cause I couldn’t dance. You didn’t even want me around. And now I’m back, to let you know I can really shake ‘em down.…da, da, da, da,” and as we turned to go to our instruments, Linda, who had a big voice, came in with, “Do you love me?”

  One night Linda lost her voice and Daddy yelled from backstage, “Cover! Cover!” Donna covered for her, and after that we knew to come in for each other, Jeanette for Donna, me for Jeanette, and so on.

  We played four shows a day and were paid five hundred dollars for the week, money which, according to Daddy, had already been spent on clothes for the act, so we couldn’t go out to a restaurant to eat like the stars of the show. Instead, we brought bologna and salami and l
iverwurst from home and made sandwiches in the dressing room. But I think Mommy and Daddy had another reason for confining us to the dressing room. We were curious, quick-eyed kids, and when we came offstage after doing our set, we spotted drugs changing hands, numbers betting, pick- ups, but only in glimpses because Daddy would be waiting in the wings and he and Mommy shooed us upstairs to the dressing room like ducks to a pond.

  “Okay, kids, come on, come on,” they urged with little claps and clucks. And when we protested that we wanted to talk to the fans hanging around the stage door, Daddy said, “Those little wenches, they’ll scream for anybody. I already showed you.”

  “Daddy, they love us. You should hear the applause and the shouts and whistles when we do our numbers.”

  “Today they love you. Tomorrow they’ll love somebody else.”

  We tried to turn his argument against him. If they loved us today, we said, why didn’t it make sense to cash in today? The way it looked to us, we had broken into show business and found out we were really good, audiences liked us and would pay to see us, so why not drop out of school and hit the circuit? We were a poor black family. Daddy especially, but Mommy too, had worked like dogs to pay for our instruments and musical training and get us this far. And now, here was our family’s chance at a big payoff.

  The remarkable thing, it seems to me when I look back on it now, is that Daddy didn’t see it that way too. But if ever he wrestled with the temptation to go for the money and let the doctor dream die—or at least be postponed—he gave no hint of it. “You look nice and you’re talented,” he agreed. ‘“You’re young, you’re shakin’, and everybody likes you. But you’re not always gonna be cute kids. You’re gonna turn into forty-year-old women. And a forty-year-old woman blowin’ a horn ain’t a pretty sight.”

  He gave us time to imagine this before going on. “Now you take a forty-year-old woman with a scripperscrap ‘round her neck. People’ll pay to see a doctor who can make ‘em well, but they’re not gonna hand over a dime to see a gray-haired, wrinkled old lady blowin’ a horn.”